CHANGE READINESS ASSESSMENT

Are you interested in starting a change in your lifestyle and have already a target in mind?

Do you feel really engaged and inspired to take these steps for moments and other moments feel like it is better to leave things as they are?

At the same time, you don’t want to give up this goal and would like to know what is going on?

Then, what you need is to understand better in which stage of the change process you are to assess your readiness for taking this goal.

When you are aware of this, you will be able to know the level of commitment and actions you need to put during this transition of change.

Professor of Psychology James O. Prochaska, Carlo Di Clemente and colleagues developed the Transtheoretical Model of behavior change (TTM) in 1977, which purpose is to assess an individual's readiness to act on change from the 5 different stages below:

How do you know if you are ready for change?

Three powerful questions can support you to understand your readiness to start this change towards our goal:

• Have you tried to perform this change before?
  This question will help you to understand in which stage you are. Then you will know what is needed to do (see picture above).
  
  
• What has been the obstacle to reach this goal?
  This question will help you to see the level of accountability, check if there is any blame to external factors. This will also provide more understanding about the level of support needed (see picture above)
  
  
• From a scale 1-10 (being 1 = not possible and 10 = possible), how motivated are you to follow a routine to reach your goal?
  In this case, up to 3 means that you are not ready to fully commit; between 4 - 7 means you are quite ready and from 7 to 10 means you are willing to start the change.
  If you rate a low score, don´t worry. Check question 2 and find out if there any obstacle that you need to plan to handle.
  
  

Remember that one of the most important steps when starting a change towards our goal, needs to be duly assessed to identify and understand our challenges.

In this way, we will be able to adapt and incorporate these to a well-defined action plan to support us through the change journey.