 So I completely forgot what I was going to say, I suppose that's because I'm lacking some self-management skills and I didn't prepare this lecture as well as I should have. Oh, maybe I don't know. Maybe it's all planned. I'm going to let you decide if we planned all these mistakes or not. Folks, so what we're going to talk about today, or in this video I should say, is self-management. So you probably have heard the term self-control and I know you've heard the term will power. So we're going to kind of break a couple of those things down. So we're going to start today, or sorry, today. I don't know why I do that. We record lots of videos each day, so I don't know why I say today. So we are going to talk a little bit about some of the background and some of the differences between why we don't like the terms will power, about why I personally and a lot of colleagues out there don't like the term self-control, even though that's the term skinner used. Keep in mind, we here at Psychor are all about the evidence-based practices and the more current, I don't want to say more current, but the stuff that's valuable, right? So skinner is awesome, but we're not dogmatic about skinner. So just because skinner uses term self-control doesn't mean that we're going to stick with that term. There's a reason why we don't want to. It has to do with reification and all that stuff. So anyway, I digress as always, if you've watched the videos by now you understand that. So what is self-management? So self-management, first off, is a set of skills. What skills? It's the application of behavior change techniques to your own behavior. That's self-management in a nutshell, right? So I'm going to use reinforcement. I'm going to use punishment. I'm going to use social media to reinforce or see the video. It's kind of funny. I'm going to use contingency contracting. I'm going to use, oh, I don't know, token economies. I'm going to use extinction. I'm going to use whatever it is in order to get my behavior under control. Whatever that may mean, right? So we still have all the same rules. We're going to establish a target behavior, but I'm going to manipulate it. I'm going to be the one that catches myself doing well. That sounds kind of funny. Skinner talked about it as a controlled response versus the controlling response, right? So he had two pieces to self-control. Notice I bounced back and forth between self-control and self-management, right? So he had those two pieces between self-control that he identified, the controlled response, the one you're trying to modify, and the controlled controlling response, the skills that you're doing to modify the behavior. In other words, the behavior analysis skills, right? Why do we not use the term self-manage, or why do we not use the term self-control? Well, in order to understand that, we need to understand why you don't use the term willpower. The term willpower allows you to reify it, all right? So reify means take something not real and make it real, okay? That's the simple definition of it. So when we say willpower, we can say, Brad has a lot of willpower. The sentence makes sense, but logically and empirically, it adds like zero. It doesn't make sense at all. You don't have it. It's a skill set that you engage in, right? So we don't like the term willpower. So we then kind of moved on with Skinner's writings to the self-control literature. We talked about the word term self-control. We have the same problem with self-control. Brad has a lot of self-control. You just reify it. It's not a thing. It's a skill set. It's a series of actions that you engage in. So when I studied under Pregum, he taught me heavily to focus on the term self-management. Because if I say Brad has a lot of self-management, guess what? It doesn't make sense. It leaves you hanging. You're like, has a lot of self-management. What? He has a lot of self-management skills, okay? So Brad has self-management skills. What are those skills? Those skills are behavior analytic skills that are the ones that we're talking about with all of the videos, right? So the ability to modify behaviors that are behaviors that you also admit. We're going to go into more detail in another video about all of this stuff, but really what you need to remember with self-control is that it's... Sorry, I make the mistake too, right? So what you need to do with self-management, what you need to remember, is that it is a skill. It's a series of skills. And just like any series of skills, you might have to go through some shaping. You might have to go through some differential reinforcement. You might have to go through some punishment. You might have to go through some extinction. You're not going to be an expert at it the first time you attempt it. It takes practice. It takes time to learn these skills. They're powerfully, they're wonderfully effective, just like they would be if you're working with anyone else's behavior. But you have a unique set of opportunities to kind of short-circuit yourself, if you will, right? So it becomes challenging to use these things when you're modifying behavior that you also admit. So keep that in mind. So we're going to go into the details in another video with some other pieces of self-management that you need to be aware about. And then some useful techniques for you that I've found to be helpful and that others have found to be helpful and that the research says is helpful. But for now, I think that's a good intro to self-management. Take care. See you soon. Bye.