Revising Unproductive Tapes - Part 2
In the last posting we discussed the importance of awareness if you want to revise or eliminate behavioral tapes. It is difficult to alter anything when you are unaware that it exists. Unfortunately, that is why many people go to their grave with many of their self-defeating behavioral tapes fully intact and unchallenged. So, we'll call step one of revising unproductive tapes awareness. Awareness does not necessarily mean that you understand something. Awareness is simply the ability to consciously feel or perceive something. Therefore, step two of revising unproductive tapes is understanding. Understanding a behavioral tape is a bit like understanding the weather. As we increase our understanding of things that typically cause certain weather patterns, we can get better at predicting the weather and being prepared for it. In similar fashion, as we increase our understanding of things that typically cause certain behavioral patterns, we can get better at predicting behavior and preparing for it. Fortunately, we have much more control over behavior patterns that we have over weather patterns.
When you notice clues that indicate a tape might be influencing your behavior (I offered several examples in the last posting), what specifically do you do next? There are several schools of thought on this. Some feel strongly that you should diligently dig into your past in an effort to discover the source of the tape (a parent or authority figure injunction, an experience, etc.). Others aren't as adamant about exploring your life history. Others will advise you not to do this. These people feel it is enough to know that certain behavior patterns are unproductive and there is little benefit to delving into the past. I think is it a good idea to remain open to all of these approaches.
I personally find trying to track down the source of tapes interesting. I recommend that you give it a try. However, if a tape was created at an early age, you may be unable to track down the source because of memory encoding limitations. For example, if a traumatic tape-creating event occurred during the first year of your life, the primary brain structure that handles fact-related memory encoding is not fully developed and won't be fully functional for several years (that's why it is difficult to remember many of the details of your life prior to age four). The structure that handles emotional tagging of memories develops much sooner in life; therefore, later in life the emotional component of a memory can be triggered while the facts surrounding the memory remain quite fuzzy. And prior to their first birthday, most children have very limited vocabularies. Therefore, facts surrounding early life events are stored in memory with little or no descriptive labels. As a result of these encoding issues, you can feel anxiety, anger, sadness later in life...and have no idea why.
Fortunately, you do not always have to understand exactly why your particular tapes were created. Sometimes it is enough to understand what might typically create a particular tape. For example, a perfectionism tape might be created when a child somehow begins to think that the price of a mistake is too high. That kind of thinking, in turn, might come from a parent, a sibling, a teacher...or it might turn out to be a self-imposed standard.
Now go back through the list of clues in the last posting and see if you can make any connections between the clue and the kind of past event or thinking that might cause the behavior or feeling. In other words, see if you can get better at understanding the sources of behavioral tapes. For example, what past event might cause an adult to procrastinate or to think that struggling is the norm? I listed fifteen clues in the last posting. This blog allows you to respond to these postings. What are some of your thoughts on the fifteen clues? We'll talk about the next, and possibly last, step in the next posting.
Chris Crouch, president of DME Training and Consulting, has spent years researching and studying both the mental and physical aspects of being productive.
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