
I recently read an editorial by clinical psychologist Jenny Taitz in which she suggested chain analysis as a key pillar of a strategy for making successful transformations. As I was reading her article, I immediately recalled that Andrea Konuma and I had integrated many of the elements she recommends into the performance and well-being programs we designed about 20 years ago.
First, let’s look at the Washington Post article by Taitz.
Taitz tells us that successful transformation is a journey not an event and falling down is one of the key elements of that journey:
“Much like learning to walk, repeatedly picking yourself up and persisting are essential to growth.”
She notes that “it’s all too easy to weave between the unhelpful extremes of oversimplifying what it takes to alter our habits and giving up on ourselves.”
She tells us that instead of falling into these extremes – which are largely driven by an emotionally hijacked, analysis avoidant reaction to the challenge of change – we should recognize that when we are struggling to realize a change it is because we are at the mid-point of a learning curve. Each time we try to change something – even if we lose momentum – we can learn more about what will be required to succeed at the change – but only if we take the time to reflect on the details of how things went off the rails:
“Regardless of what your hope is, whether it’s being less snippy with those you care about, eating more mindfully, prioritizing your sleep or cutting down on your procrastination, understanding exactly how things go awry at a granular level will help you do better next time and help you grow.
“Soon, you will notice that the same factors show up again and again — warning signs that are easier to heed if you only pay attention to them — and you’ll be on your way to creating meaningful change that transforms how you live and how you view your ability to change for the better.”
She suggests we do chain analysis:
“A chain analysis involves looking at a past setback with compassion and curiosity, with the aim of distilling takeaways that will help you try again, but more strategically, leaving you with a dose of empowerment and hope.”
According to Taitz, the steps of chain analysis are:
Note your vulnerability factors
– Fold the paper in half vertically, then use the left side of the page to jot down your vulnerability factors, or the things that preceded your slip.
Identify the prompting event
– Next, take a look at the prompting event, the moment where you went from possibly to definitely deviating from your plan.
Trace the links
– Then take some time to pinpoint the various links, or the thoughts, feelings and actions that took you from the prompting event to your problem behavior, or the actions that caused you to miss your goal.
Notice the consequences
– Finally, notice the consequences of your behavior, which may be feeling less hopeful about achieving your resolution and a little guilty and even antsy because you’ve started your day feeling rushed and behind.
Generate solutions
– Now, here’s where freedom starts to flow. Return to each step — each one a fallen domino leading to your goal detour — and generate solutions wherever possible, jotting these down on the right side of your list.
Jenny Taitz, PsyD, ABPP, is a clinical psychologist and an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. She is the author of “Stress Resets: How to Soothe Your Body and Mind in Minutes,” “How to be Single and Happy” and “End Emotional Eating.”
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In our well-being programs, we used a mind mapping technique that is similar to chain analysis to help participants dig more deeply into the conditions that tended to enable them to succeed in consistently taking a new action and the conditions that tended to block or distract them. Once they had developed a hypothesis about the “prompts” that would keep them on track, we provided them with a couple of planning sheets they could use so that they would have a ready-to-use strategy they could follow to deal with both predictable and unpredictable events that could leave them reeling.
We designed the worksheet at the top of this post for people to use to plan in advance for predictable disturbances to their BAU approach to life. For example, if you usually go for a run at 5:00 in the morning, but you know you’ll have to get up early to get ready for a special project for a few days, you could use this worksheet to plan how you’ll adjust your schedule. e.g. by doing 5 minutes of quiet deep-breathing when you wake up, then going for a short walk at the end of the day. In the mind mapping activity our participants had already done a version of a chain analysis, so they were ready to turn the results of that analysis into an easy-to-use guide (complete with RAFT storyline) Here’s that worksheet again:

One of the most common distractions/blockers is emergency demands that we cannot control and may not even be able to predict.
No matter how well we plan, many of us find that life throws us curve balls. We find that we have to deal with unexpected emergency demands in work or life that require us to drop our “BAU” RAFT and just do whatever we have to put out the fire.
Unfortunately, it is easy to get stuck in firefighting mode even after you’ve succeeded in putting out the fire. Stress is physiologically and psychologically unpleasant, but pushing through stress to produce great results can actually become addictive. The thrill of being the hero who pulled the team through another disaster unscathed fills you with dopamine to go along with all that adrenaline and cortisol. I’ve definitely found that after dealing with sort of emergency, I either can’t or sometimes don’t even want to go back to my “boring” BAU mode. Unfortunately, though, staying in emergency mode for extended periods of time is both physically and mentally unhealthy. Staying in upshift mode too long is bad for your heart and immune system. If you stay there too long, you put yourself at risk of physical or mental collapse.
Here’s where the connection to chain analysis comes in. Since getting caught in firefighting mode is a normal reaction to stress, most of us actually do experience it often enough to do a chain analysis revealing what we can do to break ourselves out of high intensity/performance mode and back into BAU mode. We created the worksheet below to help our participants be ready to UPSHIFT and rise to the occasion THEN also DOWNSHIFT to return to BAU once they were out of the danger zone. We called this process SHIFTING and we helped our participants create two additional RAFTs: one for UPSHIFTING into high intensity/performance mode and another for DOWNSHIFTING back INTO BAU mode. Here is the worksheet we gave to our participants.

Oddly enough, I found some of the elements of these two RAFTs were similar, but the framing of those elements could be adapted to fit the demands of these two totally different contexts. One of the things I learned was that FRAMES I used to escape from panic and anxiety and shift into “objective distance” worked for both UPSHIFTING and DOWNSHIFTING. They enabled me to SEEM calm in the middle of the storm and restore something closer to REAL calm after the storm. Likewise, keeping the faces of my family members in mind as I prepared to UPSHIFT helped me to remember why it was worth putting up with the stress that I knew I would be embracing, AND these same faces of those I cared about helped me remember why it was so important for me to DOWNSHIFT so that I could be there for them instead of stuck on a hamster wheel of anxiety after running on all cylinders for a few days (or weeks) to deal with an exceptionally demanding situation at work.
For more on chain analysis, see “Change can be hard. Improve your chances of success with a chain analysis.” by Jenny Taitz in the Washington Post. Here’s the link:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/01/19/resolutions-change-goals-improvement-strategies
© Dana Cogan, 2025, all rights reserved.