How to Increase the Odds of Change
Change is rarely about willpower. Four research-backed levers that make change more likely, from personal goals to organisational shifts.
By Elina ·
Change happens, but does it happen to us, or are we driving it?
I came across a photo of an old friend and found myself thinking about how much we have changed. It is strange, really. We change constantly, yet we rarely notice it while it is happening. It is only with distance that the shifts become visible. Small steps. A new place. A new person. A book that quietly alters your thinking. Little drops of experience that, over time, shape someone new.
Even our bodies are a reminder that we are not as fixed as we feel. Scientists estimate we replace around 1% of our cells daily.
So change happens. The question is: how much of it is simply life unfolding, and how much of it is deliberate and chosen?
I have been thinking about what makes change more intentional. Not in the sense of forcing life to go our way, but in the sense of shaping our direction with more care. So that change supports the person we are trying to become, rather than just the person we happen to end up as.
How to take more power in driving change
The first thing to say is that change is complex. Even when it looks linear from the outside, it rarely feels that way on the inside.
That is partly because you are not simply changing an outcome. You are changing a human being. We carry unconscious beliefs, resistance, competing priorities, and old coping strategies that once made sense. Our circumstances are rarely ideal. Our environments are not fully under our control. Other people are involved, and they are as complicated as we are.
The factors below are not a recipe. They are more like ingredients that increase the likelihood of change taking root.
1. Can you hold the dream and the plan at the same time?
One of the most practical approaches I have come across is mental contrasting.
It starts with something simple: you allow yourself to picture the future you want, clearly enough that it brings energy and meaning. Then, instead of staying in the inspiration, you also name the most likely obstacle in the present. The real thing that tends to show up when you try to change: the tiredness at the end of the day, the fear of looking incompetent. From there, you add a bridge: an if–then plan. If the obstacle appears, then I will take this specific next step.
It is often remembered as WOOP: wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. Research suggests it improves follow-through across different goal areas, and it appears to work even better when it is guided, for example through a coach, mentor, or supportive peer. Another person helps you name the real obstacle and stay with the plan when the first wobble arrives.
2. Are you mentally equipped with self-belief and resilience?
Remember the famous Henry Ford’s quote “If you think you can do a think or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right”.
Self- efficacy is a quiet driver for change and performance. In contrast with general self-confidence, is your belief that you can do a specific task in a specific context. It matters because when challenges arrive, people with stronger self-efficacy tend to persist for longer, adapt faster, and recover more quickly. They assume their actions can make a difference, so they keep engaging with the problem rather than retreating from it.
Research has found a strong relationship between self-efficacy and work performance, although it also shows that the relationship becomes weaker as tasks become more complex. That is a helpful reminder: for complex change, the goal is not to apply a neat solution. It is to learn your way forward. Small experiments, early feedback and adjustments before scaling. In complex situations, building capability and building confidence often happen together.
3. Is your environment supporting the change, or quietly working against it?
Deliberate change becomes more sustainable when it stops relying on constant willpower and becomes easier to repeat.
That is where environment matters. Habits are built through cues and context. If your surroundings make change hard, they pull against the human tendency to conserve energy.
In organisational language, this can look like shared commitment, time, resources, and systems that genuinely support a new way of working. If the environment lacks resources, systems, real commitment from leaders and relies on individuals to carry the change alone, transformation becomes fragile.
There is another environmental factor we talk about less, but it matters a lot: psychological safety. Change involves experimentation, missteps, learning, and moments of uncertainty. When people feel unsafe, they tend to shift into compliance or avoidance. They do what is required, but only as long as the pressure lasts.
This applies inside our own heads as well. Many of us try to change through self-criticism: “I should be better”, “I am lazy”, “What is wrong with me”. That creates movement sometimes, but it rarely creates growth. A steadier form of psychological safety is being able to notice a slip without turning it into a verdict. To stay curious about what happened, rather than using it as evidence that change is not for you.
4. Do you have external and internal feedback loops?
One of the most consistent findings in behaviour change research is that self-monitoring and feedback increase the odds of change.
Often the barrier is invisibility of behaviours and thoughts that run in the background. You do not even notice the moment you drift back into the default pattern. Monitoring brings the background into the foreground and gives you something to work with.
A meta-analysis looking at interventions to reduce sedentary behaviour found that people who tracked their sitting time using a device was one of the more impactful intervention and it reduced sedentary time compared to a control group (34 min a
day). The point we can take from that study is the power of objective and timely feedback loop. It turns a vague intention into a visible pattern, and that visibility creates choice.
And not all feedback is external. Some of the most important loops are internal. Resistance, for instance, is information. It may not be obvious at first, but if you begin noticing it, naming it, and writing about it, it often starts telling you a story.
Usually, the inner saboteur has a logic, and believe it or not they are on our side trying to protect us from something. The work is not to shut it down, but to listen long enough to understand what is really going on and then decide what you want to do with that information.
Final thoughts
Change is always happening, whether we choose it or not. The more interesting question is how often we can meet that change with agency, instead of just adaptation.
Deliberate change does not mean being in control of everything. It means becoming more conscious about what shapes you, and more intentional about what you practise.
If you are working on a change right now, it might be worth asking: where is this getting stuck. Is it the dream, the plan, the environment, the feedback, or the unseen inner resistance?
If you’d like, share in the comments what kind of change you are trying to make more deliberate.
Originally published on Substack.