Revising Unproductive Tapes - Part 3

In the last two postings, I discussed the importance of awareness and understanding if you want to revise or eliminate unproductive behavioral tapes. Sometimes awareness and understanding alone can help you minimize any negative consequences of a tape. In this third and final posting on this topic, I will offer a bizarre tip for rewriting unproductive tapes. First let's explain survival tapes and then explore some common survival tapes to illustrate the bizarre method of revising tapes.

By survival tape, I simply mean a tape that was formed when you were very young and still viewed your parents (or primary caregivers) as your primary link to food, shelter, protection, and other elements of life that were critical to your survival. As you can imagine, the actions and viewpoints of the people critical to your survival were extremely important to you at that point in your life. You looked at your parents or caregivers as role models when you were learning about, and deciding how, the world works. For example, if they possessed a fear-based, scarcity mentality...odds are you picked up on it at an early age and adopted this as your worldview. If they possessed a trusting, abundance mentality...odds are you adopted this worldview. It is also likely that you initially adopted their views on money, religion, politics, nutritional habits, careers, and many other aspects of life. Some of these viewpoints may still be serving you well to this day; some of them may not. As you matured and took more responsibility for your survival, maybe you challenged and revised your viewpoint on some of these issues. Maybe not. That's the critical issue to explore! Have you developed your own worldview or is someone else's worldview still driving your behavior? With this in mind, let's take another look at some of the "clues" that a tape might be driving your behavior that I listed in the first posting on this topic (February 19, 2008 posting).

• Thinking that struggling is the norm
• Possessing a scarcity (versus abundance) mentality
• Feeling the need to stay busy all the time (workaholic behavior)
• Over-medicating yourself with food, alcohol, drugs, etc.
• 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
• Being outwardly successful but feeling like an impostor

If these, or similar, tapes are creating problems in your life, or limiting your potential...you probably picked them up at some point during the "rely on others for survival phase" of your life. Therefore, it would not be unusual for you to feel strongly about these beliefs and hang on to them even if you know they are not currently serving you well. Guess what? Going along with these beliefs is no longer a matter of survival! You can challenge these beliefs if you want to do so. With all due respect to your parents...you should challenge these beliefs and either willingly adopt them as your own on revise them as appropriate. In other words, you must think through your belief inventory and make sure your beliefs are really yours. If you think long enough, you will come to the following conclusion about some of your beliefs:

"How bizarre is that...that I am 30 years old (or 40, 55, 62, 76, etc.) and I am still letting my parents control my behavior! It's time for me to make my own decisions and adopt my own worldview."

That's my bizarre tip for today. Have fun playing around with it!

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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.