1. Get Feedback From Your Clients
2. Tailor your goal-setting approach to suit each individual client
3. Use Routine Outcome Measurement
4. Identify your automatic behaviours
5. Address your most impactful automatic behaviour

Congratulations if you have by now identified an automatic behaviour you want to tackle. We’re not done yet though, there’s only half the equation in place. We will still need to identify a desired behaviour to replace the automatic behaviour.

The concept of a desired behaviour is fairly simple. It’s a behaviour that you would rather use instead of the automatic behaviour, in a given situation. As an example, instead of me explaining a client’s fight vs flight response, I’d ask them to tell me about their experience of it instead.

If after reading this post you would like more examples of desired behaviours, you can check out one of my previous posts here that lays out a few.

Once you get to the point of identifying desired behaviours to replace your automatic behaviours you’re really in the thick of it. It’s at this stage that emotions can start to flare up and run wild. There can be immense joy when your desired behaviours have a tangible positive impact on your work with a client. At the same time there can be times when you’ll fantasize about quitting everything to go work at McDonalds because it’s been 6 months and none of your attempted desired behaviours have worked.

In the end though, the process is immensely rewarding if you keep at it and persist. I cannot stress enough how patience is key here.

It’s crucial to really embody a trial and error mindset with every spare fibre of your being. Deliberate Practice is not for a faint heart, you will fail more than you succeed.

This post will be about finding ways to identify desired behaviours. At times, identifying a desired behaviour will be easy, even a matter of seconds. In other times, it can take months to identify a desired behaviour that works against a particularly stubborn automatic behaviour.

Lets say you start easy. As an example I’ll flesh out one of my own. The first automatic behaviour I tackled was my tendency to suggest a session topic to a client before asking them if they had a topic already in mind. Identifying a desirable behaviour to replace that tendency did not take long at all. I was almost instantly able to see that a desirable behaviour here would be to swap things around, to make session topic suggestions after asking the client first.

Of course, coming up with a desired behaviour will not always be so easy. So lets get into some ideas on how to think deeper.

Reflection

I’m going to give you some prompts to reflect on if you’re having a hard time coming up with potential desired behaviours.

The first prompt is to imagine your desired outcome in the situation where the automatic behaviour occurs. For example, with my over-explaining tendencies, my desired outcome was for my clients to be doing more of the work. I would literally imagine a client telling me about their experiences.

Second, consider what you could be doing differently to influence that desired outcome coming to fruition? For example, to encourage clients to do more of the work in situations where I’m likely to over-explain, my desired behaviours might be to instead offer clients prompting material to get them talking instead or to ask an open-ended question when I felt the urge to explain. One of my favourites is to ask a client “where does your mind go with what I was just saying?”. A question like is great at stopping me from talking further while letting the conversation continue to flow.

I find that the most effective desired behaviours are those that are essentially the opposite of the automatic behaviour. Like getting my clients to talk versus me talking.

Get Exploring and Ask Around

Exploring can be a useful way to generate ideas for potential desired behaviours. Find books to read, videos to watch, review blog posts, among many other things. Do anything that gives you inspiration. You won’t use everything you find, but you will have more to go off than when you started. I find that exploring helps me better conceptualise and describe what my automatic behaviour is and how I’d like to respond to it – which is very helpful for the following steps below.

If the above doesn’t quite do it for you. It’s perfectly viable to speak with someone for advice or assistance in identifying a desired behaviour. You don’t have to do it in this order, but I like to ask many people at once about my problem before asking a single person for ideas. I do this to try and access many minds at one time, like casting a wider net. My favourite way to get in touch with many people at once is to post in a Facebook group. You can find them at our Resources page.

Once I have explored the ideas given through the kind folks on Facebook, I’ll then pick an idea or two to raise with a colleague, coach or supervisor.

While my desired behaviours are always influenced by others. I find that my most established ones are those that I have refined by reflecting and tweaked over many attempts. I think this tends to happen because no one else is going to spend anywhere as much time reflecting on the challenges I’m faced with than I will. Everyone else has their own lives to live.

Practice and Patience

Give yourself plenty of time to practice your chosen desired behaviour, keep going until you feel comfortable with it and it too starts to feel automatic, that’s when you’ll know that your ready to move onto finding your next desired behaviour. If a desired behaviour isn’t working, always consider if a minor tweak is needed, before you park it completely.

Don’t forget, same as before, make sure you go slow in attempting one desired behaviour at a time. Keep giving yourself permission to pursue gradual progress. Rushing at this point will be a recipe for disaster.

This is where the Ride starts getting bumpy

If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to slot in your new desired behaviour fairly easily without much fuss, but chances are it won’t be that simple. It’s a safe bet that your Deliberate Practice efforts are about to become even more challenging. The reason why is fairly simple. While your rationale brain will be more than happy to take up your desired behaviour, your emotional brain will not. It’s when we try to upend automatic behaviours that our fight vs flight system starts to kick in. The emotional brain wants the automatic behaviours to stay, it’s perfectly happy to keep things just the way they are. It wants to prioritise safety over vulnerability or conserve energy. It also has the special ability to over-ride your rationale brain when it sees fit.

It’s all this that makes it surprisingly tricky to engage with a desired behaviour.

Despite these challenges we are not doomed to fail. By taking it slow, we can learn to with our emotional brain and help it see that a desired behaviour is not all that bad. My upcoming tips will focus on helping you to keep engaged with Deliberate Practice in the face of the challenges presented by the emotional brain. In the meantime, stay patient, it will all come together in time.

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