The Psychology of Personal Growth and Better Relationships

3How Do I Adopt New Patterns of Behavior?

The Three Cycles

In the story from Part 1 to Part 3, Yukari has grown by training herself to look at things through a different private logic while using her self‐monitoring system and training her empathy with Dr. Adler's instruction on meta‐cognition. However, at the end of Part 3's manga, she's unintentionally shown the common second child tendency to see things as win‐lose. In this chapter, I'll provide the know‐how to adopt new patterns of behavior. As illustrated in the chart below, there are three cycles in the development of new patterns.

Let's look at them in order.

The first cycle is going from understanding to capability to mastery. No matter how much someone else explains how to do something, if you can't understand it logically, then you won't decide to do it.

Next is actually trying something to see how much you can do. At this stage, if the goal is too high, you might get discouraged and lose the will to keep trying. The final stage is repeating the behavior over and over until mastery is achieved.

The second cycle is going from decision to implementation to continuance. The first step in this cycle is deciding to give something a try. Next is the actual trying. At this stage, it is not important to be perfect—even a ...