Last week, I was delighted to join my friend Dr. Becca Tagg of Del Mar Behavioral Health and the ABA Business Builder’s Facebook group on her amazing podcast, The Business of Behavior. She and I had a great conversation centered around my top 5 OBM skills every behavior analyst, regardless of their practice area, should develop. During the podcast, I very intentionally kept things simple, and repeatedly tied the science of ABA to OBM, with clinical parallels for as many concepts as possible.

As I mention in the podcast, many clinical BCBAs seem to think OBM practitioners are using entirely different concepts and principles in our practice. While we have additional tools and strategies for obtaining our results, we use the same ideas of positive reinforcement, least-restrictive alternatives, operationalization, measurement, and making data-based decisions in everything we do. Additionally, I also mention that OBM is not a consulting repertoire, but is a human interaction repertoire that transcends all applications of behavior analysis. Every application of ABA involves, not only changing the behavior of our identified patients (thanks for that term, Becca!), but of parents/caregivers, teachers, and most importantly, the direct care professionals responsible for implementing the programs.

I’m not going to spoil the podcast, which is just under 40 minutes of fun, so head over to this page to listen, or find it on iTunes. I’d love to hear your feedback as well, so feel free to email me with any questions or comments!