The Power of Intentions: Understanding the Theory of Planned Behaviour

Have you ever wondered why you make the decisions you do? Whether it's choosing what to eat, how to spend your money, or even what dreams to pursue - there's a psychological theory that can explain some of these behaviours. It's called the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), and it explores the core components that shape our intentions and ensuing actions. In this blog, we'll have a look at this theory, discuss its relevance in decision-making, provide practical examples, and give you some strategies to leverage the power of intentions in your own life.

What is the Theory of Planned Behaviour?

The Theory of Planned Behaviour suggests that an individual's behavioural intentions are determined by three core components: attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control. These factors work together to influence our choices and actions.

1. Attitude

   Shaping our beliefs and preferences attitude refers to our personal evaluation of a behaviour, reflecting whether we view it as positive or negative. It encompasses our beliefs, values, and emotions associated with a specific action. By understanding and aligning our attitudes, we can better shape our intentions and drive ourselves towards desired outcomes.

   As an example, let's say you want to adopt a healthier lifestyle. If you develop a positive attitude towards exercise and healthy eating by focusing on the benefits they bring, such as increased energy and improved well-being, you're more likely to have the intention to engage in these behaviours. On the other hand, if you approach it as an obligation, as effortful and a sweaty mess then you’re most likely not going to keep at it.

2. Subjective Norms

   Subjective norms involve the influence of our social environment on our behavioural intentions. They form our perceptions of what others think we should do in certain situations and the importance we attach our actions to their opinions. Understanding subjective norms helps us navigate the social pressures and expectations that can impact our decision-making.

   For example, imagine you're considering starting your own business. If your family and friends express their support and belief in your abilities, it strengthens your subjective norms and boosts your intention to take the entrepreneurial leap.

3. Perceived Behavioural Control

   Empowering perceived behavioural control refers to our beliefs about the ease or difficulty of performing a particular behaviour. It takes into consideration the external factors and our confidence in our own abilities to overcome challenges or obstacles. By enhancing our sense of (perceived) control, we also increase our intentions to take action.

   For example, let's say you want to learn a musical instrument. If you believe that you have the necessary resources, time, and skills to practice consistently and overcome challenges along the way, you will feel that you have high control over your behaviour and actions, leading to stronger intentions to pursue your musical aspirations.

Practical Strategies for Leveraging the Theory of Planned Behaviour

• Clearly define your goals and intentions.

• Assess and align your attitudes by focusing on the positive aspects of the desired behaviour.

• Surround yourself with a supportive social network that encourages and reinforces your intentions.

• Break down your goals into smaller, manageable steps to enhance perceived behavioural control.

• Seek out role models or mentors who embody the behaviours you aspire to adopt.

Final Thoughts…

Understanding the Theory of Planned Behaviour empowers us to make intentional choices and navigate the complex web of decision-making. By aligning our attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control, we can shape our intentions and push ourselves towards personal and professional success as every intention moves us one step closer to taking action.

Take a moment to reflect on a behavioural or goal you want to achieve. Identify your attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control related to that behavioural, and commit to taking the necessary steps to align them. Remember, small changes can lead to remarkable transformations.

References:

• Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavioural. Organizational Behavioural and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179-211.

• Sheeran, P. (2002). Intention-behavioural relations: A conceptual and empirical review. European Review of Social Psychology, 12(1), 1-36.

What do your customers think about your staff

These days with so much power put in the hands of people and their relationship with your staff due to social media, it is undeniably important that your staff leave your customers in a better place than when they came into contact with them.

Imagine the 2 following scenarios and how they will have a significant impact on the customers and any possible flow on effect

SCENARIO 1:

Your staff are just as they have always been. They are there to tick off the boxes and just basically to get through the day and get their paycheque at the end of the week. They don't have any desire to go above and beyond the least that is expected and they feel like their bosses don't notice what they have done even if they did, and they don't feel at all as if they are a part of the team. This is a classic situation that people are going through on a daily basis, and I feel George Carlin says it the best “People work just hard enough to not get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit”.

When your customers come into contact with your employees like this they don't go away with a positive attitude towards your company or business. These days they are also quick to publish anything negative on social media to get a few more likes on their pages, and this can potentially reach hundreds if not thousands of people, as a result they will not become raving fans and give positive word of mouth reviews

SCENARIO 2:

Your staff are happy and playful. They really care for the experience that the customer is having and more than that they care about their fellow employees. These staff feel like they are appreciated by their bosses and they are playing a role in a thriving team as well as really enjoying the fact that their team is doing really well

The staff in Scenario 2 will do more for their fellow teammates as well as the entire team as they feel appreciated and when you are working with people you care about you tend to be willing to do more for them than you would do if that was just another work colleague. It has been shown time and time again that people will do much more for people they care about than for themselves. This reaches out to the workplace as well. 

A simple way we can change this is to follow the footsteps of great sporting teams out there, and my background as an athlete and coach makes this easy for me, but I will explain this for you.

In sporting teams it all starts even before the pre-season. We select people that will play in certain positions amongst our team according to their skill set and their previous playing background. In the work environment this is obviously the hiring process. If our team was in search for a Front Rower that has great hit-ups, is ok defensively and we will need him for 2x 20 minute stints that is what we would go looking for. Having this level of detail going into the hiring process cuts down a lot of time.

But how do I go about it if the team is already set?

This is more difficult, particularly if the people have been there for years, and they have established routines, habits and the culture of the place is a little dodgy. You cant expect to go in swinging a sledge hammer making instant massive changes, but what you can do is go in a subtly see who is the “Team Captain” and slowly make inroads with them. As a coach in this situation you can really work it 2 ways.

1) Swing that hammer and potentially have it backfire and have mutiny

2) Create an open forum just as we would after a football match or a fight, and have a breakdown of what worked and what didn't work. In this format make it known that we need problems, and problems from ground zero. It is also essential that along with the problems we need solutions, and not personal problems, but problems that as a team we can fix. Anything personal should be left to the coach and trainers (Boss and Managers) to deal with. We have to ensure that every team member knows the direction we are headed and know their role in the team and have them playing to their strengths for the benefit of the team. The players also have to be heard. There is nothing more frustrating than having a meeting, be it in work or sports, where you have left your heart out there only for it to be ignored. Many times it isn't actually ignored, but the opinion of the player is that it was, and that can cut deep to the particular player. You will see them gradually get further and further away from the discussions and potentially become “cancer” within the team.

By Cancer I mean someone that is continually undermining the direction headed by the leadership team, and someone that has nothing positive to say at all, and is continually making negative narky comments to anyone that will listen. Unfortunately if these type of employees go unchecked, as does a cancer, they spread. I have seen this happen before, and it was with quite a positive person who felt tired of not being listened to, turned their back on what was going on and became negative. If they don’t get reined in quick the damage by these people can cause untold damage, and they may even need to be cut out, as needs to be done with real cancers.

If you can’t act on peoples comments, the worst thing you can do is to just leave it. Even in private acknowledge their comment and that you did hear and understand their issue, then you need to explain the process from there. 

Remember the most important thing is that happy staff leave a happy customer. You want staff that will feel part of the team and play their position above and beyond.

If you want to learn more about my “5 Steps Towards Improved Vitality” Feel free to email me at david@davidlindsay.com.au  

STRESS. Is it really a bad thing?

If you take any notice of people at all in society, you will notice a lot of people will say, more so complain, that they are STRESSED OUT. So the question is, is stress really that bad for you?

The answer may confuse some a little, but hear me out and read on and hopefully it will become clearer. The answer to is stress bad is both YES and NO.

The explanations I use will mostly come from a sporting/ training perspective, but studies repeatedly show a direct correlation with physical, mental and emotional stress, and that these principles can go from the sporting world into the business world.

When you start training you have a baseline level of strength, endurance, mobility and technique (mostly these start off quite low). With weight training you will stress the muscles, connective tissues, joints and bones through manipulating the weights, reps, tempo etc. If you don't stress it enough there will be nil to minimal results, yet if you over stress (by using too much weight) the muscles you are using can risk injury, and at the very least you will be very, very sore for quite a few days.

By using the right weight and rep range for your current level and the goals you want to reach, you will stress your body and you may be a little sore the next day or two, but you will create adaptions in your body becoming stronger, being able to lift heavier weights for more reps down the track. This is called progressive overload.

By putting your body, emotions and your mind under the right amount of stress you will create an adaptive response. This in itself isn't enough though. If it were people would be going "Balls to the wall" so to speak, all the time and be getting bigger and better. When you see people taking this approach, be it athletes or your employees, they will eventually hit the wall and burn out. What is needed here is recovery/rest. If you don't get enough recovery your results will eventually start to drop. This tends to create an even bigger issue in itself. When peoples results start sliding they feel they have to train harder, work longer, to get the same results, but the results keep dropping. They are trying harder and longer but their results keep dropping, leading to more, and harder work, eventually leading to burnout.

On the other hand you can be put in a no stress/ low stress environment and end up with no growth at all. Or you can be put in a stressful environment, lets use the weights analogy again, hit the "Sweet spot" of stress, by using the correct weight and reps, have the body adapt, rest too long, then lose any possible gains, only to end up at the same place you started.

The ideal way is to be put under some stress, then enable your body and mind some time to rest and recover, then stress it out again. This can be something as simple as leaving the office and going for a walk in the fresh air, or meet up with some friends to completely escape and disconnect with work and its possible issues.

The main part here is to leave work at work. I know with technology these days it is becoming harder to be done, but it is possible, and I will be discussing this in the next BLOG.

David Lindsay

Integrated Health and Vitality

Why Fitness and Vitality, and what is Vitality?

I get asked all the time "David, why did you go with Health and Vitality, and not Health and Fitness?"

There are a few reasons for this and let me explain. Health and Fitness is a very common phrase, so I would be battling with many, many other people using these names in their business, but that is a very superficial reason, so let me dig a little deeper and explain the true reason for me being THE "Health and Vitality" expert out there.

Firstly we have to get a better understanding of these words, Health, Fitness and Vitality, both individually and grouped together. Lets start with the obvious one HEALTH

Health, when checked out in a dictionary simply states "the state of being free from illness or injury". When we talk about health in the general population we are talking about a persons organs working in harmony, in a state where there is no inflammation or sickness as a result of the organs, and that their joints, ligaments, tendons and muscles work freely and smoothly in the way they were meant to operate. Someone can be completely healthy, but be far from fit (I will explain in more detail later)

Fitness by definition is "the condition of being physically fit". In my world as a coach of athletes we describe fitness as "Being able to execute particular movements that enable you to run, jump, throw, lift, in a safe and functional manner. So in this case, someone may be able to run fast, jump high, lift heavy weights, therefore by the meaning of Fitness they are extremely fit, and yet at the same time be unhealthy. There are many, many athletes that would be considered amongst the fittest on earth and yet, due to "health" issues either have to retire from their sport prematurely, or even end up dead in their prime.  

Vitality is "The state of being strong and active". We talk a lot about Vitality being that X factor, where people are not just full of Vim and Vigour, or have that spring in their step, but how it is also contagious. If you are in the same room as a person  that has high Vitality, then it is almost inevitable that at least some of it will rub off on you. Vitality therefore is more of an attitude that can be learnt by anyone that is willing to go that little bit extra to reach out and get it. I am super passionate about helping teams, workplaces, schools, families and individuals raise their levels or standards of Vitality in order to have a much more rewarding, fun and productive life.

As explained above you can be perfectly Healthy and yet not be able to run out of sight in a week, or you may be super fit and yet die due to being unhealthy. You can even have a combination of being both Fit and Healthy, and yet feel sluggish and not be a productive member of work or society. I have seen my fair share of "Fit and Healthy" people that need to have some electricity run through their system to get things done, and this "electric" shock is some Vitality. You see it when there are the "gym buffs" that can throw weights around like they were feathers and yet ask them to get things completed at work and they don't have the drive or energy to get things done at work.

With the system that I have put together, anybody can raise their Vitality with a few little tweaks of their lifestyle and habits. These have been taken from my career as a coach, trainer and athlete, as well as being able to study top high performance coaches and see what they do, and why they do it. As we progress along the concepts will start to roll together and you will see how with a few little changes here and there you will noticeably see and feel your Vitality and general Zest for life returning in all areas of life. This doesn't mean there won't be any more issues, because problems are inevitable in a full life, and it is through these problems things get done and where we find out more about ourselves, and the people around us. But you will cope better with adversity and be able to better adapt with the bumps in life that are thrown at you and therefore enjoy life so much more.

David Lindsay

Intergrated Health and Vitality