Chris Crouch's Blog

Money Tapes

Last week (January 20, 2008) I shared some general information on behavioral tapes and promised to follow up with thoughts on some of the more common tapes that influence our behavior. Let's talk about money tapes this week.

Money tapes are feelings and beliefs that somehow were encoded into your psyche and are now influencing your relationship with money. These tapes help explain why some people have a positive and healthy relationship with money and others have a negative and unhealthy relationship with money. It basically comes down to the internal messages and emotions that are triggered when you think of money. Remember, behavioral tapes are made up of two main components: facts and emotions. Unfortunately, the facts that are encoded into your memory are not always correct. Here are some common, but not necessarily true, messages about money that some of you might have heard during your formative years:

• Money is the root of all evil (a common misquote).
• Rich people are arrogant.
• Rich people are snobby.
• Rich people are miserable.
• Rich people are ruthless.
• You'd better hold on tight to your money.
• People who have a lot of money are...(you add a descriptive term).

I'm sure you can come up with a few more negative money messages. In general, these messages imply that people with an abundance of money are in some way flawed or unscrupulous. Other negative money messages help create a fear-based or scarcity mentality when it comes to dealing with money. Once these messages are programmed into your psyche, you might find it difficult to enjoy the tangible rewards of success.

When taken to extremes, irrational beliefs about money can lead to various forms of self-defeating behavior. For example, if you grew up in poverty and suddenly find that an abundance of money is flowing in your life, you might become too focused on the possibility of losing your money rather than enjoying your material success. This, in turn, could lead to counterproductive behavior that might alienate some of the people in your life who helped you become financially successful in the first place. In the end, money is neither good nor bad. Money is simply what you make of it and what you make of it is often based on your money tapes.

Hopefully you have a positive and healthy relationship with money. However, if you feel this is an area of life that you want to examine, here's a simple exercise that will help you explore your money tapes. Imagine you are very young (less than 10 years old) and you walk up to your parents (or primary caregivers) and boldly announce: "When I grow up I am going to get rich!!!" How do you think your parents would react to this statement? What would they say to you? Your thoughts should offer some strong clues to help you reveal your money tapes. And remember, when money is printed or coined by the government, it has no intrinsic emotional value or association. You give emotional meaning to money. Explore your money tapes and think about whether or not they are helping or hurting you when it comes to developing a healthy relationship with money.

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Chris Crouch, president of DME Training and Consulting, has spent years researching and studying both the mental and physical aspects of being productive.

Behavioral Tapes

I'm sure you've read that your brain is like a computer. However, in one sense, your brain is very similar to an old-fashioned tape recorder. And, this biological tape recorder is driving much of your behavior!

Tape recorders create highly predictable output. In general, you record sounds on a tape...rewind the tape to the beginning of your recording...and then press the "Play" button. When you do this, if your tape recorder is working properly, you will hear the sounds you originally recorded. Some tapes have more than one recording track. This allows you to record separate things (for example a voice and an instrument) on different tracks of the same tape. In this case, when you rewind and press the playback button, the sounds are merged and played back together.

Certain structures in our brain function much like a two-track tape recorder. When things happen to us in the ordinary course of our lives, these brain structures constantly make two-track recordings, rewind them, and store them in our memories for potential playback at a later date. However, unlike a simple tape recorder, our brains can record our internal feelings, sounds, sights, smells, emotions and many other forms of sensory input. This playback process, in turn, has the potential to significantly influence our future behavior. If we are aware of and understand our tapes (and the tapes of those we must interact with on a frequent basis), we can get better at understanding and predicting behavior.

There are two main components of the events that occur in our lives:

1. Perceived facts surrounding the event.
2. Emotions related to the event.

As we experience things:

1. Certain structures of the brain record the facts related to our experiences on one track of our biological "memory tapes".
2. Other structures emotionally tag the events on another track using four general categories of emotions: joy, sadness, fear and anger.

The facts and the emotions are then merged, encoded into our memory as tapes, rewound and stored for possible future use. For example, suppose you were attacked by a dog as a child. The facts related to the event (type, size, color, sound, smell of the dog, the place the event occurred, etc.) were merged with the emotional tagging (probably fear) and encoded into your memory as a behavioral tape.

We all have forms of programmed behavior. In other words, when things happen to us, or we think certain thoughts, our response is preprogrammed. The behavioral tapes we have been exploring have much to do with creating these preprogrammed responses. In the example above, what do you suppose will happen to the child who was attacked if he encounters similar dogs in the future? Any element of the past event...the appearance of the dog, being in the same place, hearing similar sounds, experiencing similar smells, can serve as a playback button and trigger the "being attacked by a dog" behavioral tape and the corresponding bodily responses. The facts surrounding the past event and the fear associated with the event will likely come flooding back into consciousness.

How can you use this information? Well...if you sense a pattern of sadness, anger or fear, it might be worth doing a little detective work to see if you can track down the tape that is driving your emotions and behavior. Among therapists, there are three schools of thought on this topic. Some think you must track down the original events that created the tapes driving such behavior if you want to eliminate the emotions and behavior; some think there is little or no value in exploring tapes; and some think you should first attempt to uncover the cause of any tapes that may be generating unwanted behavior and emotions...but if you can't do so...recognize that a preprogrammed tape is driving your behavior, use other methods to modify your behavior and move on. The third group of therapists makes the most sense to me. By the way, I fully acknowledge that at times all emotions are appropriate and useful...including sadness, fear and anger.

Well, this blog is getting too long. Think about any tapes that might be influencing your behavior and how understanding these tapes might be useful to you. In the future, I'll discuss some of the more common tapes such as those related to money, marriage, parenting, selling, perfectionism and other common life issues. Eventually, I'll share some ideas on how to eliminate (or actually rewrite) tapes that are no longer serving you in life.       

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Chris Crouch, president of DME Training and Consulting, has spent years researching and studying both the mental and physical aspects of being productive.

Your Possible Evolution

Years ago I read a book called The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution by P.D. Ouspensky. I don't remember exactly why I was attracted to the book. It was one of those books I somehow just stumbled across. Anyhow...it is also one of those books that I never quite got off my mind. I still drag it out every so often and ruminate on P.D.'s thoughts. My copy is full of underlined passages and notes from years of rumination. Some of Ouspensky's thoughts are pretty far out there for a plain-old-boy raised in Florence, Alabama (of course I moved to the big city of Memphis years ago...a place known more for ruminating on barbeque ribs than ideas of Russian philosophers). Here's a passage from P.D.'s book that popped into my mind the other day as I was finishing up some material for a new course we are offering in March (italics are P.D.'s, not mine):

"Our fundamental idea shall be that man as we know him is not a completed being; that nature develops him only to a certain point and then leaves him, to develop further, by his own efforts and devices, or to live and die such that he was born, or to degenerate and lose capacity for development. Evolution of man in this case will mean the development of certain inner qualities and features which usually remain undeveloped and cannot develop by themselves. Experience and observation show that this development is possible only in certain definite conditions, with efforts of a certain kind on the part of man himself, and with sufficient help from those who began similar work before and have already attained a certain degree of development, or at least a certain knowledge of methods."

Coaching is a fashionable term these days. Those who constantly analyze Tiger Woods' success talk about the value of coaching. Here's a guy who is clearly on top of his chosen profession...and he still uses a coach. I think P.D. was trying to say that we all need coaching to evolve. As I reread this passage and thought about it, I was struck by the modern-day relevance of P.D.'s thinking (he died, by the way, in 1947). Although Bullwinkle would have likely lumped Ouspensky into the same category as the pedantic announcer on Rocky the Flying Squirrel..."He's a bit wordy today Rocky", P.D.'s comments capture the essence of why we are offering a course on coaching in 2008. Of course, we gave our course a fancy name (Achieving Extraordinary Career Results); however, those of us who developed the course informally refer to it as the "coaching course." P.D. recognized years ago that people need help if they want to evolve. It was true then, it's true now, it will be true in the future.

By now, most of you have figured out that my use of famous Russian philosopher and Bullwinkle references in this blog entry is a shameless and not-so-well disguised ploy to get you interested in taking a look at our course offering. I'll eventually post some blogs about the sales process and the fact that if you are not proud of your offerings and willing to tell people about them...why bother calling yourself a businessperson. And I promise not to get "Donald Trump" on you, but from time to time I will chat about the business side of my activities. Anyhow...I had one more reason for posting this particular blog. I am a big believer in the "Law of Attraction" (as it was articulated long before the popularity of the video The Secret). Robin and I have always tried to attract interesting people into our personal and business lives. Although we identified our "official" target audience when we were initially planning this course as those interested in having a coach or those interested in being a coach; unofficially, I would like to attract people to this course (and our circle of friends) who find Russian philosophers, Bullwinkle and people like Albert Einstein, The Beverly Hillbillies, Carl Jung, Gary Larson, the presenters at a TED conference and the crew of Star Trek equally as interesting and capable of teaching us valuable life lessons. Who knows where we might boldly go in March if we get the right kind of people together in the same room.

Live long and prosper!    

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Chris Crouch, president of DME Training and Consulting, has spent years researching and studying both the mental and physical aspects of being productive.

The Refusal of the Call

Last week I wrote about the Call to Adventure and mentioned that I would follow up with comments on the Refusal of the Call. If you sense a new adventure awaits you in life and for whatever reason you refuse to take steps to pursue the adventure, you can probably expect one of the following outcomes:

• Life will "dry up" and become uninteresting. You might feel as if you have "been there...done that" as you approach your daily activities. Things that previously excited and energized you will no longer do so. Feelings of restlessness might drive you to seek various forms of "medication" such as overindulging in food, drink, TV watching, buying grown-up toys, etc. to counter your increasing level of boredom with the status quo. Or...

• The forces of the universe (in various forms such as chance, serendipity, synchronicity, disaster, misfortune, accidental occurrences, an injury or financial setback that prevents you from pursuing your current life path, etc.) will "kick you in the seat of the pants" and force you to pursue the adventure (a new position with your current employer, a job with a different employer, starting your own business, a new relationship or marriage or any event that catapults you out of your normal world).

Getting up in the morning and looking in the mirror with regret and dread rather than joy and excitement every so often is no big deal. That's a normal part of the ups and downs of life. It's when you notice an ongoing pattern of regret and dread that you might want to challenge your life-path assumptions and think about the fact that a new adventure might be seeking your attention.

So...if you are tired of being bored or being booted around by the universe...what do you do about it? How do you detect or discover your next Call to Adventure? Follow the energy trail. It's similar to the game we played as kids when someone told you if you were getting "hot" or "cold" as you wandered around a room looking for a secret object. Look for small, medium and large things or activities that energize you...they are clues that you are getting closer to your calling. Consider small, medium and large things or activities that drain you...they are clues that you are moving away from your calling. Keep playing the game until you develop a "knowing" (or at least a sense of relative certainty) that you are on the right path. Be patient with the process...keep experimenting with new things and you will eventually discover your calling.

P.S. Special note to some of my personal friends on the topic of discovering your calling: I think you are getting very close! Callings do not always call for radical changes in your lives. Sometimes minor tweaks make all the difference in the world. Sometimes guardians of the threshold (to a new adventure) are just trying to test your resolve and make sure you are truly ready for your new adventure. Trust your instincts and forge on if it feels right.      

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Chris Crouch, president of DME Training and Consulting, has spent years researching and studying both the mental and physical aspects of being productive.