 I think we'll start this out with an example of what the hell the chain is going to have to eat. I wonder if I'm alive. Grabbed by the function. Yeah. In order to understand that. A whole bunch of viewers out on YouTube land. Maybe. Not currently, but... Oh, crap, I hate it when I do that. I get myself all tucked in a circle and I forget that you're not really here. It's all post-hoc visual... Brain. Anyway, self-management. Folks, I've already taken you down the path of self-management. I've taken you about why we call it self-management. I've told you about the whole reification thing with words like, you know, self-control and even worse willpower. It's just an awful word. Go watch our other video about why. But anyway, so we're... We're here at Psychor deciding to demonstrate a little bit about this stuff that we've been kind of promising for a while. So we are in the middle of recording all of the self-management little series here. So this is kind of the introduction to that. So I want to take you through the basics of self-management before we get too far into all the other stuff. The goodies of the self-management plan and all that that we'll be doing over the next couple of months. So let me give you some information. So we're going to do an in full-blown self-management plan. That plan consists of a lot of different pieces. So I'm going to go through those pieces very briefly today and in follow-up videos we're going to get into more detail. I just want you all to start getting going on your self-management plans, at least thinking about them and figuring out what will be included in the types of work that you may want to do and behaviors that you may want to change. So first off, the first thing that we need to address is behavior. Right? Surprise, surprise. Psychor and behavior kind of goes together like peas and carrots. But the behavior is simple. What behavior are you going to change? Do you have a behavioral deficit? In other words, are you going to increase some response? That's what I'll be working on. Or do you have a behavioral excess? In other words, are you doing too much and you need to decrease it? Maybe, you know, tip and pack the drinks a little bit too much. Maybe eating too much candy. And I've had that problem the last couple of weeks because, you know, candy corn and me and self-management, that, you know what, I don't even apply self-management skills to candy corn issues because that's just, it's a whole different thing. Anyway, so behavioral excesses, we try to reduce those. So those are the types of things we're going to work with. So you've got to define your behavior extremely clearly. What behavior you work on? If it's exercise, what kind of exercise? What does exercise mean to you? Be hyper-specific. Give me some topographical definitions, behavioral definitions, functional definitions. Any way you can define it will help you learn to measure it, which is another key. How are you going to measure all this stuff? Right? So as you're thinking through this stuff, you need to build a self-management plan, which is going to turn into a contract. All right? So we're going to put all these pieces together over the next few weeks for you, but we're going to stitch them here right now very temporarily. The plan itself includes what's the behavior? How are you going to measure it? What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? It involves a couple of things, antecedent interventions, consequent interventions, and we'll come back to those in a minute. And then how are you going to stick to it, so to speak? What sort of prevention techniques are going to use to make sure that you don't short-circuit yourself or cause a lapse in your behavior change plan or in your self-change plan? So anyway, so let's get into maybe some of these antecedent interventions, right? So some of the things that we can do from an antecedent perspective, think of it as discriminative stimuli. For example, if I'm wanting to run, if I'm going to improve my running, which happens to be what I'll be working on, then I need to figure out what kind of things can prompt me to run. Well, I need to set the occasion for running, so I better have some running shoes, right? That's cool, right? So then I better have some running shorts. Otherwise it gets kind of warm, and maybe some running clothes, and I could do a headband, and I could do this whole 80s theme, and we could pull some spandex on. Maybe that's an idea. I might be a little foreshadowing there, but don't tell anybody. And so we got all the things that we need to go running, and now we need to prompt ourselves to run. So my self-change plan, which you'll be able to view specifically online, involves using calendaring systems for antecedents, as well as some other things which we'll get into. So we also have to worry about motivating operations. Those are kind of an antecedent intervention, right? Those change the value of the reinforcer. So, you know, so what's the reinforcer? We'll get to that in a few minutes. Anyway, so that's kind of what we're focusing on for antecedent interventions. For consequent interventions, what do you get for engaging in the behavior that you need to engage in? It's getting toasty today. So what are we, what are you going to get or what are you going to avoid as a result of engaging in the particular behavior that you're engaging in? So we can set up natural, we would hope to come into contact with some natural reinforcers down the road, but early on, you're probably just going to be doing some arbitrary reinforcers. So things like, I'm going to buy myself pants if I engage in X, Y, and Z. So I identify the behaviors and I find a reinforcer for that. Hey, that's one thing that we can do. I have got my colleague behind the camera there. He's going to be helping out. He'll be providing some reinforcers for me of his choosing kind of, anyway, long story, you'll have to read the plan. So we're going to put all these pieces together. In other words, what we're going to do is we're going to use all the tools that we've used here in behavior analysis that we've demonstrated and talked to you about on the channel to change our own behavior. It's literally the same thing as changing somebody else's behavior, but you're the one managing the contingencies, which is a unique issue because it's really easy to short-circuit yourself and kind of make it really easy for you not to do the work. So anyway, what else? Oh, back to the behavior thing. I always forget to do this. It's important, but so back to the behavior thing. We've got the behavior, let's say, is exercise, right? Now, one of the things that you might have noticed about me is over the course of watching a bunch of videos, you've seen this change a little bit. You can kind of hear it. It's kind of sounding almost a little melanish in there. It's not the way it should sound, right? So anyway, it's getting a little bigger. I'd like to lose a little weight, but you know what? Losing weight isn't a behavior. It's an outcome. When you're defining your self-change plan, you want to figure out what behaviors you want to work with, keep in mind your outcomes, but don't write down your outcomes in terms of that's what you're going to change because you can't just lose weight. There's no way to do that. It's not just something you can do. But it is something, it is a good goal. So we've got to set in some goals and all this stuff. Anyway, I kind of ramble. I'm kind of going crazy because there's so much. But I do want to tell you about how important it is to also record behavior because without recording behavior, you're not going to have a good thing to find out if you're doing well or not. So again, look at the plan that I'll be posting for you. There's a whole bunch of dependent variables that I'll be measuring to track my particular responses. And anyway, there's just a lot going on. So there's a lot to read about. So I will be, when you're doing self-management plans, you have to get a baseline. So we've got to find out where we're at currently before we start an intervention. Then we're going to start an intervention. And I've got all sorts of antecedent interventions. I've got consequent interventions involved. We've got social supports built in and all sorts of things. Hopefully that will result in me getting a decent figure back. But you never know. That's just kind of the goal. But as long as I improve what I'm working on and improve my running and exercise a little bit more, I think I'll be happy. So we're going to be tracking all sorts of things about running behavior, including running. And how far, how fast, how many times, and how well we do and how many steps and a whole bunch of other things. So at this point, folks, you might have figured out that this is the start of my self-management plan, which is an important thing because you've got to commit publicly to making your self-management plan. It's an important piece. It actually has some empirical support for that. So, folks, thank you for listening today. It's time for me to go get a baseline in this beautiful country. There's nothing like trail running. Take care. See y'all. Clip!