Take a close look at aspects of your own behaviour – such as study habits, sporting skills, health habits or personal-interaction skills – and identify a target behaviour that you would like to modify. Choose either an undesirable behaviour that you would like to eliminate or a desirable behaviour that you would like to strengthen. Monitor your behaviour for a few days and respond to the following questions:

What is the behavior you want to change?
Why do you think the problem exists in the first place?
Why do you want to change the behaviour and what benefits will change bring?

Create a program proposal incorporating all relevant conditioning principles. That might include: the use of positive and negative reinforcement, schedules of reinforcement, punishment, shaping, modeling, primary and secondary reinforcers, extinction, stimulus generalization/discrimination, and so on.

Toward the end of the week, reflect on the following questions:

1) Was the program successful or unsuccessful?

2) What are the plausible explanations for the outcome?

3) If it was successful, propose a brief plan to maintain the change. If not, propose an alternate plan that can be carried out in the future.