The process of making a behavior change is difficult in the best situations. In an upsupportive environment, it can be nearly impossible. That is why seeking and finding the right kind of social support to empower you to make changes can be one of the single biggest steps in your change process.

What does the right amount of social support look like? Here are a few characteristics I’ve pulled together regarding good and bad support. Let’s start with the negative:

Signals of negative support

• Inconsistent: When you need to be held accountable, they need to follow through in a consistent and predictable manner.

• Agenda driven: They have an interest in the outcome of the change. I find this commonly happens when a spouse or parent wants a family member to change, it’s a fine line between helpful and destructive.

• Authoritative only: A person trying to make a positive change doesn’t need to have someone acting as the police or a parent, they need encouragement and mentorship.

Signals of positive support

• Empathetic: The person or community trying to provide the support doesn’t need to have gone through the same process, but being empathetic about the challenges is required.

• Open and Candid: To provide quality support, it can sometimes require tough conversations. Good social support will always be willing to be candid about the situation, without being mean or hurtful.

• Selfless: A positive support system won’t bring their own interests into the process, they will seek out the best decisions and advice for the individual’s desire to change.

Having a good social structure is always important for your happiness, however there can be times that require a little extra support. In those times, it’s critical to think about the above characteristics of positive and negative support, then figure out who is there that you can lean on a little more.

Thinking through some of the types of social support I have needed, a couple experiences come to mind. In sharing these, I hope it can help create a solid image of what these characteristics could look like in practice.

When I was going through my divorce, I needed a support system that would help me navigate the challenging emotions and difficult decisions that period required.

How does emotional support relate to habits? That is a much larger discussion, but can be summarized in the fact that when you’re constantly having to navigate emotional stress and decision making, it takes away energy and motivation for those positive changes you want to make.

During this period is when I started seeing Joe, the therapist. It was and is surprising to me how helpful it was to have someone to talk to, that provided an unbiased and supportive voice throughout the process. The ability to lean into someone who doesn’t have a vested interest in the outcome was worth more than I could really put a price on.

This brings up another valuable point. Sometimes we can find the support we need in places that don’t have a price tag. However, there are times when we will need to search out places where we can pay for that support. It may be with a coach, mentor, advisor or therapist. One thing that doesn’t change based on if the service is free or for a fee, are the characteristic of positive support you should look for. There are clearly bad coaches, mentors, advisors and therapists.

The good ones will be consistent, predictable and without a personal agenda.

Another time where I needed to lean into some social support was in March of 2015, when I decided that I wanted to stop drinking. At the time I had the observation that I was using beer to deal with my stress. In most cases, it was a single beer as I sat down to watch some television. In a few cases, it would be drinking a too much with friends. However, I recognized the pattern and did not want to trend further down the path.

I made the commitment to quit a couple times, with no success between March and May. The challenges I faced were mostly social situations where I would be out to dinner with friends and found that having a craft beer was the default behavior.

To find success, I enlisted the support of a friend that I knew would be honest, consistent and hold me accountable. I reached out to my friend Jeff, shared my goal, and that I needed to tap into him for some accountability.

After a little more discussion we had a plan on what that accountability looked like. That accountability plan was for six months, in which I didn’t have anything to drink. At the end of the six months, I found that the default behavior was to not drink in any situation.

What I learned from that experiment was that sometimes different people in your life can serve as support for specific changes you would like to make. In my case, I knew that for the specific goal of drinking zero alcohol for six months, Jeff was the right person.

When you want to change your behavior it can be a very challenging process. That is why surrounding yourself with the right people is critical.

This can look different depending on your situation. It might require you to enlist someone new to take on a specific role, or it may include making a group of friends aware of your desire to change.

It could also mean finding the people in your life that are providing negative support and either removing them or shielding yourself from them so you have the space necessary to grow.