Overview: OK, so I am a little excited about this one. We’re building a behaviour change course. Hopefully the post will help you make sense of that phrase. Reading time ~ 2 minutes.
We’re building a behaviour change course!
We = me + Tamina Levy + Lucy Lewis + mystery guests (people who join in along the way)
Why is this is important you might ask?
Improvement in any domain of our life (mental health, physical health, financial status, social wellbeing) requires some kind of lasting behaviour change.
If I want to build wealth, I need to budget, save and invest. If I want to improve my physical health, I need to exercise, eat well and get appropriate rest. If I want to do better at my studies, then I need to develop good study habits (i.e. behaviours).
Behaviour change underpins how we grow within, and adapt to an ever-changing world. If I want a different life, I need to change how I act in the world.
But behaviour change is hard! Think back over your life and consider how many times you thought to yourself something along the lines of “I really should change…..” but then found yourself engaging in old patterns of behaviour.
Because behaviour change is hard, there is value in learning more about it: tips, tricks, tools, techniques. That is what we hope to achieve in the course.
The course will provide tools for individual behaviour change (i.e. changing your own behaviour), tools for helping others change their behaviour (i.e. clinical tools) and tools for changing the behaviour of a community.
It will be built on the excellent work of the Centre for Behaviour Change at UCL. Both Tamina and I have been digesting their theories and practices (e.g. behaviour change wheel) and reckon we’re ready to start teaching them.
This is a really cool development for me. I’ve been interested in UCL’s behaviour change work for years, stretching back to when I was doing my PhD and thinking about how we help people make beneficial lifestyle changes after having a heart attack.
This will be a first chance to really dig into this work.
I am excited!!
Although the course is being built for allied health in CNHS, my hope is the resulting course will be relevant to all students. This includes those wanting to make changes in their own lives, as well as those wanting to use these tools clinically (e.g. medicine, allied health) or in building community level interventions (e.g. public health).
I’ll keep you posted on our progress, here on the blog. It will be a good opportunity to share some behaviour change insights along the way.