If you’ve ever tried to break a habit and failed, you know how difficult it can be to change behavior.Your job-seeking clients are trying to develop new behaviors and skills that will enable them to enter or re-enter the workforce. Some may also be working to overcome personal challenges, and/or need to move from being uninterested or uncertain about employment to finding and maintaining a job.
For you, the career professional, understanding behavior change and how it occurs will be important to your success in supporting, motivating, and guiding the job seeker through this process. Reflecting on the difficulties you may have experienced with your own behavior change can help you relate to what your clients are going through. Your understanding and empathy will enable you to better support and serve them through this process.
Think about a time when you have tried to stop a behavior like smoking or overeating, or start a behavior like becoming more organized.
- Did you realize for some time that you needed to change your behavior, but did nothing about it? This behavior is typical of someone in the PRECONTEMPLATION stage.
- What made you change your mind and begin considering behavior change? Was it education about health risks that caused you to think more seriously about changing? Or was there a triggering event, like losing a very important document, which caused you to make a decision to change? These are both examples of CONTEMPLATION behaviors.
- Did you make a New Year’s Resolution or say, “On Monday morning, I will stop for good.”? Did you enroll in a smoking cessation class, Weight Watchers, or some other form of training or support? Did you ask a friend with great organization skills to help you get started? These are behaviors demonstrated by a person in the PREPARATION stage.
- When did you start practicing all of the new behaviors you learned? Perhaps you began preparing healthier meals or regularly clearing your home of clutter. These are both indicative of the ACTION stage.
- Did you successfully stop smoking, lose weight, or keep your home neat for six months or more? How much time passed before you felt that your old behavior was truly behind you? At this point you would have been in the MAINTENANCE stage.
- At any time during the process did you RELAPSE, or slip back into your comfortable old behaviors? Did you stop to think about what may have caused you to slip up? Was it a favorite food, socializing with smokers, or a hectic schedule that caused you to become disorganized again?
If you did identify your relapse trigger, did you use this knowledge to improve your next attempt at behavior change? Perhaps you learned to avoid keeping ice cream in your home, or to limit yourself to non-smoking events and locations, or to tidy up small messes before they become large ones. Unsuccessful behavior change efforts often provide valuable insights that help a person create relapse prevention methods such as these. The better a person understands his or her triggers and how to manage them, the more prepared he or she will be to make future attempts at behavior change.
These stages of change represent a normal and a predictable pattern in the process of change. We also know that:
- Change happens gradually,
- The rate of change is different for each person,
- Progress is driven by a person’s own motivation to change, and
- One size does not fit all.
The Stages of Change model is often used in counseling related to recovery from substance abuse, smoking, gambling, and other lifestyle changes. Did you know it can also be applied to employment?
Our Tips for Supporting Job Seekers Through the Stages of Change post explores the Stages of Change model in depth, including job seeker characteristics, goals of the career professional, and facilitation techniques.
Familiarizing yourself with this information is critical in enabling you to adapt your counseling style and effectively facilitate your clients’ behavior changes with respect to job search.
Receive email notifications when new posts are added: