Behavioral Changes, Speech Example

The principal, teachers, and my fellow students; I pass on my greetings. I am Mr. / Ms. xxx, student representative of department xxx of the xxx college.  It is my pleasure to welcome you all to the day’s forum on “changes in behavior”. The purpose of my talk today is to persuade my audience to take time to think on how to change behaviors. While there are positive behaviors, one can adhere to, there are those that need a complete drop, and new positive behaviors that one should adopt to become a better person in the society. Actually, the truth is that if one cannot change the attitude, its better to change the behavior.

Some people are too rigid in welcoming change; but they ought to understand that change like rest. Behavioral change is of paramount importance to individuals who are directly working with other individuals. In the daily operations, an individual is more likely to meet different kinds of people, all with different characteristics, yet they need our services, or rather, we could need their services. In the process of interacting and meeting our daily needs, we recognize the need to change our behaviors, adapt new behaviors or drop some other behaviors (Zanna, and Rempel 89). We take a practical example two persons, a borrower and a lender. The lender is in business, and expects all the borrowers to adhere to the terms and conditions of borrowing money. The borrower is in need of money to satisfy his daily needs, and pay the amount later with respect to the terms and conditions.

It is not surprising that difficulties may arise in the process of repayment. This situation calls for a behavioral change from both parties, where the behavioral changes of the lender influences the behavioral changes of the borrower. The borrowers’ inability or unwillingness to pay presents a threat to the lender, which the lender ought to be aware. All the same, it is a business, where quitting is not a solution, thus he has to get an alternative solution. The lender ought to employ behavioral changes in the terms and conditions to borrowers. He could opt to adapt the debt snowball, a system based on the compounding principle. The most appropriate way to deal with such threats is taking on a response efficacy. A response efficacy is a recommended response that prevents the treat from happening (Prochaska, Johnson, and Lee, 128). The response efficacy in this case is the approach of changing the method of calculating the interest.

In a response efficacy, there is the employment of evidence and examples that strongly support the recommended response as a way to avert threats. In the above case, the practical examples involve the real mathematical calculation that brings in the difference in the amounts (principle plus interest) at a specific time. On the other hand, the lender can opt to take a self-efficacy, where he raises confidence in performing response to avert the treat. Unlike a simple interest rate where the rate is fixed, the compounding principle earns interest on interest. This behavioral change would scare the bad debtors, who would then hustle to pay as much as they can, and pay the full debt as quickly as they can. This behavioral change would not only suppress bad debts, but it would also enable the lender to earn more interest.

There is the borrower who has financial management problems, or rather poor financial behavior. He more often has to go “borrowing” money from lenders to sustain his life. Once again, his financial management problems follow thus making it difficult to pay off the debts. To deal with this problem, this person has to adapt behavioral change in terms of financial management. The immediate behavioral change this borrower should adopt involves the intervention of targets and setting of goals. It would be reasonable for this borrower to set a goal like, I want to commit myself towards paying xxx$ per months towards settling the loan. At first, it would be difficult to adapt the new behavioral change. However, with determination and commitment, the borrower would end up settling the loan. Again,  the tough terms and conditions  put forward by the lender would play  a major role in streamlining behavioral changes in financial usage; an extravagant person, for example, could end up to being a careful spender, through the behavioral changes.

Behavioral change is more of setting targets to meet and goals to achieve after a specific period. A good behavioral change ought to be long term. The driving agent towards meeting the goal is determination, sacrifice and the desire to attain the goal. A person aiming at losing weight would not wake up one morning and say, “I’m going to lose weight”, and rather this person would contemplate of losing weight in three months. With this in mind, various activities ought to accompany to achieve the goal. Such a person would have to sacrifice on consuming fast foods, any form of fatty stuff or sugary food, and at the same time, spare time for exercises. This ought not to happen only in the three months, and it should be a long-term behavioral change. It calls for a complete change in lifestyle.  General behavioral changes need embracement to attain the desired goal (Ajzen 200).

Another practical example would be a student who aims at scoring highly in the final exam would have to sacrifice some of the non-educational activities. He or she should take time to study, research and practice and confide in the instructors to achieve the desired goal. All the discussed behavioral changes are positive and appealing behaviors that need adoption.

The greatest barrier in embracing behavioral change is fear. Hundreds of individuals would stand stranded while wondering of the severity and susceptibility to follow afterwards. Fear powerfully influences behavior as it cause people to deny reality, however, if channeled in an appropriate manner, it motivates people to carry out further investigations (Armitage and Conner, 780). Fear is a negative behavioral characteristic that should stop immediately. It is upon every individual to walk confidently in doing anything, be it institutionally right or wrong. It is better to speak out whatever that is wrong, to adapt behavioral changes instead of keeping it in silence out of fear.  Having short termed changes is not appealing as they only meet temporary objectives. Changing the behavioral character of a student to impress a teacher for a short period, for example is not appealing. It only reflects pretence and not character behavioral change. In general, a behavioral change should be long termed, and with an associated determination to reach a given goal.

I am so delighted for having spared time to listen to my speech. I hope you have taken into account the most important notes as being ready to embrace change, having the courage to speak out whatever that is not right and setting out goals to help in meeting the desired life goals. It is very important for people to take time, study their lifestyle, find out what is working out, and embrace behavioral change in whatever that is not working out. Thank you very much.

Work Cited

Ajzen, I. The Theory of Planned Behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50, 2004: 179–211.

Armitage, C., and Conner, M. Efficacy of the theory of planned behaviour: A meta-analytic review. British Journal of Social Psychology, 40, (2001): 471–499.

Prochaska, J., Johnson, S., and Lee, P. The trans-theoretical model of behavior change: The Handbook of Health Behavior Change, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Springer, 2008.

Zanna, M. P., and Rempel, J. K. Attitudes: A new look at an old concept. The social psychology of knowledge, 315–334. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.