nancylebov | "What do you do instead?", generalized

I've been rereading Steve and Connirae Andreas' _The Heart of the Mind_ (neuro-linguistic programming applied to various common problems, some of them serious, and quite a good book), and finding out what to do instead of the behavior you're trying to get rid of is an ongoing theme. People do what they do for reasons--sometimes the reason is important to them, and they need some other way of achieving that goal. Sometimes they're doing what they do because they don't have a strategy for coming up with alternatives, and they need to add a strategy to their repetoir.

Since I know someone is going to ask, neuro-linguistic programming is a recent school of psychology based on the premise that people act in accordance with their model of reality. The best way to change behavior is to change the model.