Change is hard - status quo is painful

Change is hard for many reasons and for most people. First and foremost any action that gains a reward will be repeated. Secondly, only practical actions will lead to actual change. While you think of a change needed, nothing will happen until you actually act upon that need.
So what are we doing right and how can we enforce that behavior?
Marshall Goldsmith has in his The Success Delusion shown that humans, and in fact any animal, reinforce successful behavior. The more successful we become, the more positive reinforcement we get - the more likely we are to experience the success delusion: I behave this way. I am successful. Therefore, I must be successful because I behave this way. The chain of conclusions is just plain wrong. We all hear what we want to hear. We want to believe those great things that everyone is telling about ourselves. That belief in ourselves is what helps us become successful. It is also what makes it very hard for most of us to change.
You are successful! You are doing a lot of things right! Why do you need to change? Humans, society and the world are constantly changing. You current behavior that is contributing to your success needs to change in order to stay successful. If you don't change then you will eventually find yourself in a situation where people will consider you less successful. Or current successful behavior that helped getting us to our current level can very easily block us from going to the next level of performance. So change is needed to stay put and to develop further. Status quo will eventually deteriorate our performance and not lead us to develop our skills and performance any further.
How do you then change?
Analyzing what actions need to change might be easy. However, it is very easy to fall into a problem focusing exercise where you end up emphasizing on problems instead of what is working. Start identifying what is working today and what you are really good at. What new behavior should you add? By doing more of what is working and what will improve your future performance you will do less and less of what is not part of the new you.
So what about the how?
Now it becomes harder in my own experience. It's easy to say that I want to behave in this or that way, much harder to actually change the behavior. Here are some real world examples of turning insight into action:

• Start acting. Just do it to borrow a catch phrase from Nike. When Toyota incurs change in their own organization they follow a very simple 3 step model. Identify change needed, start acting, explain and conclude what actually happened. The importance here is the action before explaining why. Just do it!
• Make action steps concrete. Make them possible to act upon. "Listening to customers" is not possible to do here and now (unless you actually go out and ask them questions ...). Turn it into concrete actions; what does it mean here and now to listen to customers? If the customers are saying they don't want to wait by the checkout, then have the cashiers call for help anytime more than one person was waiting. That is possible to act upon.
• Make a goal hierarchy. Break down your overall goals into actionable goals. Connect actions and people to each of the goals. Follow up you actions that leads to the higher level goals.

This way you turn insights into action. Action into new behavior. New behavior into further success.

More to read:
Marshall Goldsmith Library: The Success Delusion
Fast Company September 2010: Tase the Haze
MIT Sloan Management Review Winter 2010: How to change a culture: Lessons from Nummi