History of the BE-Print:

The BE-Print is a self-help system designed by Shelley Roy and Glenn Smith. It grew out of programs that they developed for their work with individuals, schools, families, businesses, corrections, athletics, and other organizations. In 2005, Shelley and Glenn created and implemented use of the original BE-Print as part of the Personal Life Skills courses at the Mecklenburg County jail, Charlotte, N.C. When they returned to the community, every inmate who graduated from the course was equipped with a BE-Print to use in daily self-evaluation. The BE-Print was a detailed agreement an individual made with himself to define and describe the person he wanted to be and to serve as his personal yard-stick for self-evaluation. The BE-Print has now become an integral component in programs for individuals young and old; educators and students; parents and children; management and employees; correctional officers and adjudicated juveniles and adults; coaches and their players, along with leaders and their constituents.

History of Behavior

For centuries man has attempted to better understand himself/herself and others. We have searched for explanations for why we do what we do and have attempted to find answers to why others think, feel and act as they do. As a topic of philosophy, understanding behavior can be traced to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China and India. Officially as a scientific field psychology is thought to have begun in 1879 Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory dedicated exclusively to psychological research. Since that time we have progressed through what might be summarized as three major beliefs of theorizing about human behavior. These three major shifts are somewhat subtle thereby making it nearly impossible to tell exactly when and where one ended and the next began as each has its own rhythm and flow.

The first major belief about behavior can be characterized by the work of Ivan Pavlov a physiologist, who is credited for first demonstrating classical conditioning in his experiments with dogs. This belief also includes another famous psychologist B.F. Skinner who used rats in an electrified cage to test his theory of operant conditioning. These views often known as behaviorism are both linear meaning they are creating a direct link between an external stimulus and an internal response. The idea here was that something outside of us (i.e. an external stimuli) could make us do something. Closely linked to this was the idea of rewards and punishments. The next major belief about behavior is linked with the first in that they both are premised on the idea of a direct link between a stimulus and a response.
The second major belief about behavior can easily be remembered as My NEED made me do it! Like the first chord, the second is also linear in nature; a direct link between the cause and the effect, the thinking once again is 'do this' to 'get that'. This movement floated in with such theorists as Noam Chomsky, Jean Piaget, Abraham Maslow, William Glasser and Albert Ellis. They took our understanding of human behavior from Behaviorism into humanistic psychology known as Cognitivism. For many this was a welcome shift to the recognition of something happening internally. Cognitive theory contends that solutions to problems take the form of algorithms and rules that are not necessarily understood but promise a solution, mental processes which mediate between stimulus and response. Instead of asking how a man's actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject's goals, needs, or instincts. Basically, the stimulus was moved from the outside to the inside. In this view, theorists endow the person with the capacity to be selective about the environmental events to which that person will respond. Here motivation is conceived as being internal. Nevertheless, like the first view motivation in this view is also conceived to have some connection to past events. This view is still very visible today, especially when explaining societal problems. There is also an assumption that as we view others behavior we can pinpoint the function of the behavior as being need fulfilling. When we know what the cause of the behavior is we can then help individuals act in new or different ways.
The third major belief is based on Perceptual Control Theory.
(See BE-Print Science)