Changing for Good: A Revolutionary Six-Stage Program for Overcoming Bad Habits and Moving Your Life Positively Forward Paperback – January 1, 1994

Unless you are (or think you are) the ultimate, paradigmatic exemplar of Peter Drucker's "Effective Executive", you can probably think of a thing or two you would like to change about yourself. Certainly, CEOs and other top executives tend not to be heavy drinkers, heavy smokers, or simply very heavy, so you may be looking to change one of those behaviors. Or perhaps you find yourself making poor decisions because of long-standing impatience, arrogance, or inability to tolerate uncertainty. Perhaps an executive coach has identified a characteristic that you agree is less than optimal for your own career and for your organization's performance. Yet, like organizational change, personal change is hard. Reliable guidelines have been lacking for either kind of change. The authors of Changing for Good make a strong case for having developed a more scientifically sound approach to personal change.Clinical psychologist James Prochaska and his colleagues studied the many strategies self-changers used to quit smoking, stop drinking, and lose weight. These researchers faced a challenge in figuring out what works and what doesn't for people attempting to change: over 400 distinct systems of psychotherapy now offer a helping hand. Each school relies on at least one, but often several, specific techniques. One group of people who were quitting smoking, Prochaska discovered, were using more than 130 different techniques. Anyone wanting to identify the most effective methods to change an unhealthy behavior would quickly become overwhelmed with options and confused by competing claims.In 1975, Lester Luborsky, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, had published research showing that all generally accepted psychological therapies produced practically equivalent positive outcomes. Prochaska thought that if he could uncover what the therapies had in common, perhaps he could integrate them. After puzzling over his transtheoretical data, Prochaska realized that all those energetic disputes over causes, and all the diversity of techniques, concealed an underlying simplicity in the processes of change which described how change is produced. His final roster of processes of change included nine members: consciousness-raising, social liberation, emotional arousal, self-reevaluation, commitment, countering, environment control, rewards, and helping relationships.By tuning in to what self-changers told him, Prochaska also discerned several distinct stages of change: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and termination. Enduring success at change requires that you know what stage you are in for the problem you want to overcome. "The key to success is the appropriately timed use of a variety of coping skills." The right processes should be used for each stage of change. Knowing the stage for the change at issue is the crucial element. Once you know that, you can deploy the relevant process, each of which can work through a variety of techniques such as observations, bibliotherapy, policy interventions, psychodrama, role playing, value clarification, imagery, decision-making therapy, logotherapy, relaxation, desensitization, environmental restructuring, contingency contracts, and social support.As Prochaska and co-authors explain in detail, self-changers who tried to apply a technique suited for one process would be frustrated if that process were irrelevant to their current stage. You wouldn't get anywhere applying reinforcement techniques brilliantly designed for the process of reward if you were still in the precontemplation or contemplation stages. On the other hand, behaviorist techniques of reward and environment control could be effective if you were in the maintenance phase. If you were in the contemplation phase, where you accept that you need to make a change but still need to understand more about it, you should use change processes associated with the experiential, cognitive, and psychoanalytic traditions. These would include methods for self-reevaluation, countering dysfunctional thoughts, and emotional arousal. Improving the chances of successful change, Prochaska had shown, depended on matching processes and stages of change--a discovery whose breakthrough nature has been proven repeatedly ever since.

A friend who is a professional counselor recommended this book to me. If you want to change something in your life but can't seem to do it, this is THE book to help you change. Clearly written with no psycho-babble or mumbo-jumbo, this book explains the path to change that all human beings experience. Better yet, it explains how to take advantage of this basic human nature and make the changes you've always wanted to make. Like a GPS for navigating through the fog, this book will get you there. It's helped me immensely. Highly recommend it for anyone who wants to make a change in their life.

I bought this book used and not expecting much, but surprisingly it turned out to be quite helpful in changing a few of my bad habits. The book description in the ad doesn't really describe what it's all about. The authors did research on people trying to make a change to their life, such as quitting smoking, and determined that there were different stages of change. In other words, you don't just wake up and change overnight, instead you have to spend time in some early stages contemplating it, and then develop some new behaviors that will counteract the old bad habits. You also have to be prepared with how you'll respond to a "failure" when you backslide and do the thing you're trying to overcome. The description of the stages and process is insightful and allowed me to understand why I couldn't just change at the drop of a hat, and shouldn't beat myself up over not doing so.I would caution that the book is not that "deep" and is more for people who are having a fairly minor problem kicking a "habit" as opposed to somebody who's got more emotional baggage going on. For example, the book uses an example of someone who wants to stop drinking out in bars with his friends every night, but you get the impression the person wasn't an alcoholic with a "drinking problem," or at least not yet. Similarly, the book would be good for someone who wanted to drop that 25 extra pounds but not so good for someone who's 100 pounds overweight and a compulsive overeater.Although I think this is a basically good book, it suffers from a common flaw of self-help books: it's got a lot of padding to make it book-length. Really, the research and all else that needed to be said could have been covered in far fewer pages. At some point the book becomes very tedious because it's just repeating the same stuff over and over with different examples. That's why I only gave it 4 stars instead of 5: it's useful, but not all that interesting to read past a point. The authors also have a quiz to see where a person is in the "change" process that isn't very helpful in determining where you actually are. I took it and the score had me a couple of stages back while I was actually in the process of eating healthy and losing weight.

This book helped me to make several major changes in my life in 1996. Twenty years later, all of the behaviors I changed are but a distant memory. I have used the teachings of this book to help many people and groups including SMART Recovery (even before the Stages of Change described in this book were incorporated into SMART literature). It's insightful, powerful and persuasive because it's based on actual research on people who changed self-defeating habits. This book gave me the courage to believe that I had a plan for change that would work, and that past setbacks were just part of the process of achieving my goals. Without it, there's a good chance that I would have given up and had a pretty miserable life.