Revising Unproductive Tapes - Part 1

Over the last few weeks I covered a few behavioral tapes that influence your relationship with money, your spouse, children and other areas of your life. Remember, not all tapes are counterproductive, some tapes are quite helpful. For example, the "look both ways before you cross the street" tape should serve you well throughout life.

But what if a tape is not helpful and you want to eliminate or revise it? It may require professional help to revise some well entrenched tapes that drive serious forms of self-defeating behavior; however, you can probably revise many of the more common counter-productive tapes on your own. I'm certainly not implying that it will always be easy to alter some of these tapes that have been so much a part of your psyche for many years; however, it can be done and it is worth the effort to give it a try. And sometimes it is easy. If you want to eliminate or revise a tape that is not serving you well, here is the first step:

• Awareness - You must be aware of the fact that a tape has been activated, is controlling your behavior and is taking you in a direction that is not in your best interest. Here are a few clues that indicate a counterproductive behavioral tape has been activated: You publicly say yes to something but privately would prefer to say no, you publicly say no to something but privately would prefer to say yes, you overreact to a minor or insignificant event, you can't seem to get closure on an important event, you sense unexplained frustration, restlessness, anger, sadness or fear...in general, something about the situation just doesn't feel right to you.

Here is the hard part about detecting or becoming aware of a counterproductive tape. You are much less likely to realize that a tape is controlling your behavior when you are experiencing strong emotions. Therefore, when you behave in a way that just doesn't feel right to you, or ends up taking you in a direction that you really did not want to go, make a note to slow down as soon as possible and take some quiet time to think about what happened. Think about why you said yes, or no, or got angry over an insignificant event, or behaved in some other counterproductive way.

That's enough to get started. We'll take about what you might do after you become aware of a tape in the next posting. Meanwhile, here are some more tape "detection and awareness" clues for you to consider:

• Procrastination
• Thinking that struggling is the norm
• Possessing a scarcity (versus abundance) mentality
• Feeling the need to stay busy all the time (workaholic behavior)
• Excessive multitasking
• Over-medicating yourself with food, alcohol, drugs, etc.
• Repetitively encountering the same problem
• Feeling that you (or your work) are not good enough
• Difficulty accepting praise or compliments
• Difficulty accepting criticism
• Difficulty asking for or accepting help from others
• Feeling that what you have is never enough
• Irrational or illogical guilt feelings
• Avoidance strategies (working on the unimportant and ignoring the important)
• Being outwardly successful but feeling like an impostor

These are some of the more common clues that indicate a tape is in play. I'm sure you can come up with plenty of additional clues. We'll talk more about what to do next time. However, here is the good news. Sometime awareness is the cure. Tapes rely on illusions to survive. Tapes can rarely survive a strong dose of clarity and reality. Block out a few minutes of quite time and think about the beliefs that might drive some of the above forms of behavior. Have fun!

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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.