Unlock Potential: Align Actions with Goals Through Behavior Management

by Maura Thomas and Shawn Thomas

Key Points from this Article

1. By mastering the skill of personal behavior management along with the other five components of the Empowered Productivity System, you can harness your focus, minimize your effort, and ensure that every action is a significant step toward your desired outcomes.
2. Behavior is: any action or thought made by a person in response to internal or external motivators.
3. Your thoughts and actions can be described by how automatic, or habitual they are; i.e. by how much conscious thought, or intention, is required to perform them.
4. Habitual behaviors are easier and more reliable than intentional behaviors because they require minimal cognitive effort. So, its in your interest to establish habits that promote success in life and work.
5. The only way to develop new habits is to repeatedly practice the more difficult, intentional behaviors.
6. When we refer to “behavior management” in the context of the Empowered Productivity System, we mean the application of a systematic approach to influence and direct your thoughts and actions, in the service of developing great habits that will help you accomplish what’s most important to you.

Introduction

Learning and practicing behavior management will enable you to:

• break free from limiting habits,
• more easily adapt to change, and
• make consistent, meaningful progress toward your most significant results.

Do you ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels, struggling to reach your goals despite your best efforts? You’re not alone. For professionals like you, who are often inundated with constant distractions, disordered information, and competing priorities, aligning behavior with your goals is not just a productivity hack—it’s key to achieving success.

Getting from Goals to Useful Action

Setting goals is easy. Pretty much all you need to do is declare, “I want xxxxx.” For example, “I want to run a marathon,” “I want to be more effective at work,” or “I want to find more time to get things done.” Once you declare a desire, your goal is set. That’s all it takes.

But that’s the easy part. “How will you get there?” is the critical question. You have to ask yourself, “How can I make sure to align my actions with my goals?” Failing to do so can lead to a tremendous amount of wasted time and effort.

This is the reason that “Performance Rewired: Change Your Habits to Change Your Life” is one of the six modules of my Empowered Productivity™ workflow management system. 

Whether your goal is to become more productive, increase your team’s ability to manage their time effectively, or improve your physical health and well-being, making the necessary behavior changes will be challenging. However, by learning and mastering this skill, along with the other five components of the Empowered Productivity System, you can harness your focus, minimize your effort, and ensure that every action is a significant step toward your desired outcomes.

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Why Behavior Management is Key to Your Success

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of this concept, I want to give you an idea of why this topic is so important to my work: implementing the Empowered Productivity System—so you can achieve more of your most significant results—requires changing your habits. Its as simple as that. And, unfortunately, changing habits is hard.

Behavior management is an important part of Empowered Productivity because I have learned that without it, the people I teach will begin to learn and implement the system, only to fall back on old habits. And as a result, they’ll end up feeling like they don’t have the freedom or ability to make the necessary changes to achieve all of their goals.

As the saying goes, “Planting seeds is simple, but nurturing them until they grow into a thriving garden requires consistent effort and patience.” In other words, it’s easy for me to understand that exercising regularly is good for my health, but it’s another thing altogether to consistently get myself to the gym to do it. From the standpoint of Empowered Productivity, after training with me, my clients understand why Attention Management is important for their success. But successfully changing their habits so that they can maintain control over their attention is much more difficult.

Successfully controlling habits requires learning exactly what behavior is and how it works, including what you can do to “hack the system.” Learning from experts how to most effectively change your behavior, as we have, will help you succeed.

To help you with that, Shawn (Empowered Productivity coach, and my husband) and I have distilled in this article what we’ve learned from several experts and our own experience through decades of work in personal and professional development.

Defining Behavior

To begin understanding how you can take control of your own behavior, it is helpful to first know what it is.

A simple definition of behavior is: any action or thought made by a person in response to internal or external motivators. This comprehensive definition includes observable actions such as typing or walking, as well as unobservable cognitive behaviors like thinking and reasoning.

Unfortunately, many people limit the definition of behavior to observable actions, discounting the fact that we have habitual ways of thinking as well as acting. One detriment to this is that when they go looking for ways to improve results for themselves or others, they limit their options. When identifying ways to make improvements, its important to also take into account what you are thinking as you take action. Consider, for example, the mental calculations and decisions you make about a person’s motivations before responding to their actions.

This definition of behavior as ‘any action or thought made by a person in response to internal or external motivators’ also acknowledges the fact that your thoughts and actions are influenced not only by external motivators such as other people and things in your environment, but also by internal motivators like your attitudes and feelings. If you have a negative perspective about one person and a positive perspective of another, you’re likely to evaluate the actions of the first more harshly than the second.

Taking internal motivators into account acknowledges the fact that mental processes shape your behavior, and subsequently your outcomes, as much as external influences. Because of this fact, it is important to identify and understand how the things you feel and believe affect what you do.

From Intentional to Habitual Behavior

In addition to understanding that behaviors are all thoughts and actions, it’s also important to know that behaviors can be described by how automatic, or habitual they are; i.e., by how much conscious thought, or intention, is required to perform them.

Habits are thoughts or actions that we don’t have to intentionally make happen. They just happen. And we’re not always aware when they’re happening or have happened.

It’s estimated that 40-50% of what a person thinks and does each day is done out of habit. Thats enough to merit giving them significant attention. They are present in every area of our lives every day. Even the ways we think about and communicate with others can be habitual.

Intentional behaviors, in contrast, are not automatic. We have to make a conscious decision and an effort to make them happen. Making them happen requires some degree of awareness of our goals or desires, sufficient understanding of the necessary steps to achieve those goals, and the self-discipline or motivation to follow through with those steps.

Sometimes this is simple and doesn’t require much planning or effort, but it can often be more demanding.

Here is the reason that it is difficult to develop new habits: until a behavior becomes a habit (and therefore “automatic”), it is an “intentional” behavior. And intentional behaviors require more effort and attention than habits.

Behavior Management is a Balancing Act

Balancing habitual and intentional behaviors is essential for achieving desired outcomes. Consider the everyday act of driving safely from one place to another, which involves both intentional and habitual actions. Here is an example: Have you ever found yourself in your car realizing that you can’t remember the last several minutes of driving? That’s possible when the route is very familiar. Having driven it time and again, you can easily do the driving and make the necessary turns without thinking about it, out of habit.

But let’s say that you need to stop at a store on your way home, and this requires you to turn left at a specific intersection instead of turning right as you normally do. Taking the left toward the store will require intentional behavior. To succeed, you will have to consciously set, and hold onto, an intention to make that left turn rather than turning right out of habit.

When needing to do something that deviates from habit for any reason, you have to make a conscious effort in the right moment to make it happen. Otherwise, as in this example, you’re going to find yourself at home, suddenly realizing that you failed to stop at the store—and then you have to make an extra trip or go without.

Why Intentional Behaviors Are Harder To Execute

Habitual behaviors are easier and more reliable than intentional behaviors because they require minimal cognitive effort. Once established, they operate on autopilot, bypassing the need for conscious decision-making and conserving mental energy for more complex tasks.

Intentional behaviors, on the other hand, demand focus, motivation, and willpower—resources that can be finite, prone to fluctuation, and demanding for our brains. Let’s take a look at the psychological and physiological reasons why intentional behaviors are more challenging to execute than habitual behaviors:

• Neural Pathways: Habits are reinforced through the formation of specific neural pathways in the brain. These pathways become stronger with repetition, making habitual actions more automatic and easier to perform over time. Intentional behaviors have not established strong neural connections, making them more effortful.
• Cognitive Load: Intentional behaviors require conscious thought and decision-making, which consumes more mental energy and cognitive resources. Habits, on the other hand, demand little to no cognitive effort.
• Willpower and Self-Control: Engaging in intentional behavior requires self-control and willpower. Habits bypass this requirement.
• Environmental and Contextual Cues: Habits are automatically triggered by specific cues, which makes it easy for us to do these behaviors without conscious thought. Consider that when you walk into your office first thing in the morning, you automatically reach up to turn on the light. Imagine sitting down in your chair only to realize you forgot to turn on the light. Intentional behaviors lack developed connections with triggers, so they require conscious effort to remember and initiate.
• Emotional and Motivational Factors: It’s always easier to prioritize short-term needs instead of long-term goals, especially when you are stressed, tired, or sleep-deprived (and we are so often at least one of these things, if not all three!). Habits can be driven by emotions, or desires to reduce stress or discomfort in the short-term. Lacking developed connections to emotional triggers, the intentional behaviors that are required to realize long-term goals are often derailed by habits.
• Routine and Familiarity: Habits are comfortable and familiar. It often feels “right” when we engage in them, and “wrong” when we don’t. Intentional behaviors are novel and uncertain which generally makes them uncomfortable. Because of this, we are naturally inclined to stick with familiar routines rather than sticking with new, intentional thoughts and actions. This is often one of the hardest barriers to overcome.

Because of these factors, when intentional and habitual behaviors conflict, habits tend to win. This is why it’s so easy to fall back into old patterns, or habits, when trying to change the way you do or think about any particular thing. It’s really hard to stick with new, intentional behaviors.

Unfortunately, the only way to develop new, great habits is to repeatedly practice intentional behaviors until they become more and more automatic (habitual).

How Your Habits Form

In order for any thought or action to become a habit, you must consistently repeat it a sufficient number of times, and appreciate the result, for the associated neural pathways to develop. A helpful statement to keep in mind here is: neurons that fire together, and get dopamine, wire together.

The number of repetitions required to establish a neural pathway will vary. And a number of factors, including the frequency and consistency with which you enact the behavior, the environment in which the behavior happens, and your appreciation of results, will have an impact.

That’s why the adage that “it takes 30 days to create a habit” is more a reasonable approximation than an absolute truth. It takes frequency and consistency over time for neural pathways to develop in the brain. How much repetition and over how much time will vary depending on the behavior and the circumstances in which you engage in the behavior.

Every time you repeat a behavior in a given situation, and then appreciate the result, the neurons in your brain that were involved in the behavior get a bit of dopamine. And that dopamine feeds the growth of the neurons that were involved in the behavior, leading them to become more and more well-developed. Over time, this leads to the specific behaviors becoming more habitual, requiring less intention.

The Habit Loop

From a practical standpoint, the process by which habits form can be described through the Habit Loop, which was popularized by Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habit (2012). The Habit Loop consists of three main components:

1. Cue: This is a trigger, an internal or external stimulus that initiates the behavior. It can be an event, a time of day, a reminder, an emotional state, another habit, or a location. One example of a cue is the event of walking into your the office at the start of the workday.
2. Behavior: This is the behavior that happens in response to the cue. An example of an action behavior a person might typically do after walking into their office at the start of the workday is to review their calendar and task list for information about their responsibilities.
3. Appreciation of results: This is the awareness and appreciation of the desired outcome or feeling that follows the behavior. It reinforces the behavior, making it more likely to occur again in the future, provided the same cues are present. One example is the feeling of satisfaction that comes with marking something “complete” on a to-do list. The trick here is to notice that feeling of satisfaction and celebrate it a bit. Note that we are deviating here from Duhigg’s description, which emphasizes rewards rather than appreciation of results. We feel this change is useful because rewards are not always required to reinforce a behavior. Instead, the key factor in successful behavior management is the recognition and appreciation of the results achieved through the behavior. By appreciating the positive outcomes or feelings that follow a behavior, you are more likely to repeat the behavior when similar cues arise. This approach emphasizes the internal satisfaction gained from the behavior, aligning with more sustainable and intrinsic motivation strategies, rather than relying on external rewards.

Repetition of this loop is all it takes to form a habit. And while we can control, or be intentional about the process, our habits frequently form fairly unintentionally. In this case, things begin innocently enough: a person has a few spare minutes and feels a sense of boredom (cue) then decides to check social media, emails, or news on their phone (behavior).

And because our social media and news apps are very well designed to keep us engaged, these interactions typically provide a small burst of satisfaction or distraction (appreciation of the result, or reward).

That burst then creates a connection between the sense of boredom and the all too easy solution of picking up the phone, increasing the likelihood that the person will pick up their phone whenever they feel that sense of boredom.

Over time and with repetition, this behavior becomes more and more frequent, as the brain strengthens the association between boredom and the quick fix provided by picking up the phone to check social media, emails, or news outlets. In time, the person will be hooked. They will automatically reach for their phone whenever they have a spare moment or feel slightly bored.

Common Workplace Habits That Hinder Success

Unfortunately, as in the example above, you may have unwittingly developed habits that hinder your ability to reach your potential and achieve your most significant results. You may have developed some of these counterproductive habits by working in what we call a “culture of urgency”— one that values fast turn-around times, operates on adrenaline, and leaves little time for thoughtful, proactive thinking.

Some bad habits that might result from such a culture include ignoring work-life boundaries, skipping breaks, prioritizing speed over quality, neglecting professional development, and sacrificing collaboration.

13 Habits That Hinder Productivity

Here are some other hindering habits that you can replace with more effective Empowered Productivity behaviors:

1. Multitasking: Do you frequently switch between multiple tasks rather than dedicate sustained attention to one task? Research proves that doing so impedes deep work and progress.
2. Being Constantly Reactive: Do you find yourself constantly checking emails, social media, and your team communication platform? This can stop you from proactively making progress on an important task.
3. Procrastinating: Do you delay tasks that you find stressful or less interesting? Up to 20% of people are chronic procrastinators, so if this is you, you’re not alone. However, procrastinating can cause a backlog of work, leading to rushed and disorganized efforts when deadlines approach.
4. Overworking at the Expense of Your Health and Well-being: Do you work long hours without breaks, skip meals, and forego regular exercise? This can lead to fatigue, burnout, reduced productivity, and long-term health issues.
5. Failing to Document Processes: Do you lack clear, documented processes for tasks and projects? If so, you’re not working as effectively and efficiently as you could be.
6. Failing To Use A Workflow Management System: A workflow management system will help you organize all the details of your personal and professional life. By failing to use one, you are forced to reinvent methods for accomplishing tasks, wasting significant resources, skyrocketing inefficiencies, and building unnecessary stress.
7. Skipping Regular Reviews: Do you regularly review and organize your files, tasks, and schedules? Failing to do so can make you feel disorganized, overwhelmed, and even defeated.
8. Neglecting Your Task List: Are you failing to use a task list? Or do you forget to regularly update your task list? If so, you probably miss some deadlines and forget some tasks.
9. Losing Track of Notes: Do you sometimes fail to take organized notes during meetings? Do you lose track of the notes, find yourself flipping through your notebooks to find what you need, or miss important action items from your notes? This can lead to lost or incomplete information and a failure to follow up on tasks to which you’ve committed.
10. Letting Your Inbox Overflow: Do you allow your emails to pile up in your inbox, adding flags to the important ones? If so, you’re likely causing yourself unnecessary time, effort, and stress.
11. Ignoring Physical Clutter: Do you ignore physical clutter? This will only work for so long. Research shows that allowing clutter to build up in your physical environment adds to your mental load and hinders your ability to focus.
12. Interrupting Others: If you stop and act every time it occurs to you that you need to talk to someone, you’re likely to generate a lot of frustration. First, you interrupt your work and your train of thought. Then, either you miss the other person and receive a message back at an inopportune time, or you interrupt her.
13. Failing To Make Information Self-Serve: Workplaces rely too heavily on synchronous communication, which happens in real-time. With more offices going remote or hybrid, this can create unnecessary bottlenecks and delay teams from achieving their most significant results.

You may have some or many of these success-stifling habits. If so, the great news is that by prioritizing management of your behavior, along with implementing the other components of Empowered Productivity, you can begin to replace these habits with new and more productive behaviors. Start by reviewing this article which discusses what you can do instead of the behaviors listed here.

So, what exactly is behavior management?

When we refer to managing behavior in the context of the Empowered Productivity System, we mean the application of a systematic approach to influence and direct your intentional and habitual thoughts and actions, in the service of accomplishing what’s most important to you (the definition of “productivity”).

Performance Rewired encompasses a range of strategies that can help you ensure that your behaviors, or those of others, align with your goals, values, and expectations. These strategies include:

1. increasing awareness of detrimental or ineffective habits,
2. replacing those with better ones that support your goals,
3. maintaining and reinforcing beneficial habits, and
4. behaving intentionally rather than habitually as situations demand.

Effective management of behavior is a journey, not a destination, so the steps are a continuous loop. Being intentional about behavior is hard, as we’ve described above. Applying systematic approaches identified or developed by experts can make it easier. Some examples of systematic approaches that are widely used include Cognitive Behavior Therapy, the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change, and the Fogg Behavior Model.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a strategy that focuses on changing unhelpful thought behaviors, improving emotional regulation, and developing personal coping strategies. It involves identifying negative thought patterns that lead to counterproductive behaviors and replacing them with more positive and realistic thoughts. It’s effective in treating a variety of issues, including anxiety, depression, and addiction.

The Transtheoretical Model, also known as the Stages of Change model, is a framework that can help people through different stages of behavior change. The stages include pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. This model recognizes that behavior change is a process and that people may move back and forth between stages as needed. Interventions developed using the model are tailored to the current stage of change. For example, for a person who is in the preparation stage, the focus might be on creating a detailed action plan and setting realistic goals, while in the action stage, the emphasis is on implementing and sustaining new behaviors.

The Fogg Behavior Model was developed by Dr. BJ Fogg. This theory emphasizes that behavior is a result of motivation, ability, and prompts. With this model, Fogg suggests that for a behavior to occur, you must have sufficient motivation, the ability to perform the behavior, and a prompt to trigger it.

With this understanding of the importance of ability, he suggests that behavior change can be greatly facilitated by making the desired behavior easier to do and undesired behaviors more difficult. To that end, his approach incorporates the concept of “tiny habits,” which involves starting with very small, easy-to-achieve behaviors to build momentum and confidence.

What does all of this mean for you?

Generally speaking, your behavior, everything you think and everything you do—whether intentional or habitual— either contributes to or detracts from the likelihood that you will get the results that you want in your life and work.

While most, if not all people do many things every day that contribute to their success, they also do many things that detract from it. Like it or not, I’m guessing that you have done things in the past that reduced the likelihood that you might realize the results you wanted.

Given this, it’s in your interest to prioritize behavior management. It’s in your interest to learn to manage intentional behaviors so that you can deviate from habits when you need to. And it’s in your interest to manage your behavior effectively so that you can take charge of both the suppression of bad habits and the development and maintenance of great new habits that will lead to a higher level of success.

You want to be able to rely on excellent habits. To back me up on this, here’s an important quote from the father of American psychology, William James:

“The great thing then is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can.”

A Process for Changing Habitual Behavior

Because behavior is the primary driver behind every one of your results, the starting point in many behavior management efforts is an evaluation of results. This may include identifying new things you’d like to achieve as well as an evaluation of past results to identify opportunities to improve.

From there, you can identify the thoughts and actions that might lead to the new results you desire or those that led to or influenced your less desirable results, including their motivating factors. This evaluation of your thoughts, actions, and motivations will give you an idea of what you may change in order to improve your results.

Here is a simple, six-step process for managing your behavior:

1. Choose a behavior: a) Proactive approach – Identify an unrealized, desired result and then a behavior or set of behaviors that you believe might lead to it. As an example, let’s say you want to run a 10k. In this case, the behaviors that might lead to success include adding appointments (with reminders) for regular runs to your calendar, identifying and registering for fitness classes, or reading about healthier eating habits. b) Reactive approach – Identify an unsatisfactory result and then a behavior or set of behaviors that you believe led to it, along with a replacement set. An example of the reactive approach might be, if you’ve been sleeping poorly, you may suspect that late-night screen time is a culprit, and decide to replace it with a more calming bedtime routine, such as reading a book, stretching, or meditating.
2. Increase your awareness of what you’re doing currently instead of the new behaviors, and why you think you’re doing it.
3. Identify and clarify your reasons for making the desired behavior changes. Create a clear description of what you want to achieve or avoid by making the change. How will you and your life be different as a result? Why is this important to you and how does that compare to the importance of the behaviors you want to replace?
4. Develop your understanding of what the new behavior(s) will entail or require. This is where you might lean on the experts who have developed systems to help you achieve what you want. For example, running on a regular basis will require having the right gear and someone with whom you can run.
5. Based on your new awareness and understanding, set yourself up for success by proactively creating the circumstances that will support the desired changes. This includes setting up your environment for success (including tools and other people), identifying ways to make the new behaviors easier and old behaviors more difficult, and setting up triggers/reminders for the new behaviors —leaning on the advice and insights of experts.
6. Persistently and consistently practice the new behavior(s), evaluating your progress, making adjustments as needed, and celebrating when the new behaviors happen as well as the achievement of your desired results along the way. This iterative process of taking action, celebrating behaviors and progress, and reflecting then adapting based on new insight ensures continuous improvement and sustained behavior change.

At first, implementing this behavior management process may feel slow and awkward, but over time, and the more you do it, the more habitual the steps will become. As they become more and more automatic, they will be easier and more reliable for you. Through practicing this, you can make a habit of developing great habits.

For those wanting to improve their performance, The Empowered Productivity System is a set of behaviors you can implement to achieve more with less stress. You can learn about this system by reading more about it on this website or in my books, or learning about more customized approaches, like keynotes, team training, or individual coaching.