Retraining Behavior So That It Works For You And Not Against You With Yvonne Barnes Holmes
Yvonne has been a highly successful academic and clinician with a strong track record in teaching, training, publishing and presenting for the last 20 years. She has published over 150 scientific articles and book chapters and given over 500 presentations and workshops internationally. She was an Associate Professor in Behaviour Analysis and a Senior Research Fellow at Ghent University before establishing Perspectives Ireland. She is a world leader in behavioural science and has co-developed the Process-based Behaviour Therapy technique (PBBT).
What is Process-based Behaviour Therapy?
PBBT is essentially a way of understanding and influencing human behaviour, its role in psychological suffering and its role in understanding behavioural obstacles. It allows us to understand what drives behaviour, the behaviour of a group, and workplace behaviour. It helps you understand and identify the patterns of your behaviour and what we would say the functions of those patterns are.
Behaviour doesn't happen randomly; it’s never chaotic. It’s just complex. An example might be the training events they do at Perspectives Ireland, where they teach participants to understand the functions of their behaviour and the variables in their environment that drive those functions and keep the behaviour going the way it's going. It's often a real eye-opener for people during these training events where people have a sense that we know what we're doing, that we own our behaviour, but often, our behaviour holds us, and we end up on autopilot.
Change Begins by Defining Yourself
When encountering PBBT for the first time, it helps if participants have a working sense of what they value and where they want their behaviour to go, but it is surprising how grey those areas can be. People very often don't have the time. They feel that things aren't going the way they want, but it can sometimes take quite a bit of time at the beginning of a training event to say, what is it that you want? We want this life to be your life, so if people haven't got any clarity on the life they want, part of the process at the beginning of training is defining, who are you? Now, that's a challenging question, but it's the best place to start.
PBBT at an Organisational Level
Yvonne shares how PBBT can be beneficial in the work environment, and she remarks on how important it is for people to reconnect with why they love their job in the first place. So not only does it lead to improvements in wellbeing, but it leads to a stronger desire to go to work. This part of the therapy creates a decline in the burnout numbers and reduces the number of sick leave days, but the most critical factor to look for is, has it increased the desire to go to work? Has it improved the desire for promotion? Has it increased the level that employees would like to invest in the company? Not necessarily by doing more hours, but more in a healthy measure of what they enjoy doing and don’t enjoy doing, which will ultimately lead to a conversation with the HR manager.
Dig Deeper Into the Subject
With 20 years of experience and 150 papers published, Yvonne keeps collecting data and improving the method. She invited us to know more about the subject of behaviour therapy; you can find some information on her website www.perspectivesireland.ie. If you have the time, you can google her name to read her research and know more about how her patented therapy works and the benefits it can lead to at an individual and organisational level.
Listen to the entire podcast above or on your preferred podcast platform, and you can watch the video of our conversation through this link.
About Your Host
Brian Crooke is a wellbeing educator, speaker and adviser, empowering Irish organisations to promote and sustain wellbeing within their workplaces.
He is the founder of The Work Well Institute and the Workplace Wellbeing Ireland community and is Course Director of the Postgraduate Certificate in Workplace Wellness at Tangent, Trinity College Dublin. He is the host of The Work Well Podcast.
If you want to bring sustainable wellbeing to your workplace then check out The Work Well Institute’s flagship programme, Developing a Workplace Wellness Programme that Lasts.
In his spare time, Brian is bringing free resistance training to every county and community in Ireland through his parkHIIT social enterprise.
If you have any suggestions for future topics you'd like to hear on the show, email Brian directly, brian@workwellpodcast.com
Competition Time
We've teamed up with The Fruit People to give you the chance of winning a delicious Fresh Fruit & Healthy Snack Pack delivered directly to your door. There's a pack available for each episode of Season 3 of The Work Well Podcast, and a new winner will be chosen each week.
The competition takes place on Instagram.
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Follow @thefruitpeople and @workwellireland
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The weekly competition opens as soon as that week's episode is released (episodes will be released every Wednesday for Season 3). The competition closes the following Monday at 10 pm, and one lucky winner will be announced at lunchtime on Tuesday (we'll be checking each step has been followed).
Best of luck!
Terms and Conditions
Competition is open to residents of ROI only.
This competition consists of 12 weekly giveaways.
One winner will be chosen at random from the comments each week.
You can enter each week and as often as you wish :)