Work with The Ladder as follows: First plan your change "from top to bottom". You specify your goal, translate that into behavior, and choose your method of support. And then you just get on with it. You try it out "from bottom to top" to see if it works. You make sure your support techniques are in place, then you try out your new, desired behavior, and work towards your goal. Along the way, you see how things go and adapt if necessary. What you're actually doing is making use of behavior research twice. When you plan, you make use of all kinds of evidence-based insights. And when you try things out, you do your own research: you analyze the situation and assess whether what you have thought up actually works. What you're doing, in fact, is continually going through the "empirical cycle". You've got an idea about how you're going to approach a change, you make a start on it, and you see if it works. Change is a learning process. It's not about proving that your plan works. It's about finding an approach that works for you and that brings you closer to your goal. That's the key.