Chris Crouch's Blog

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.

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.            

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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.

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.

The Mother-of-All-Tapes

During the last few weeks, I posted some comments on behavioral tapes in general and a few comments on specific tapes that might cause problems with your spouse, your children, your relationship with money, etc. This week I am going to keep things short and tell you about the mother-of-all-behavioral-tapes. I'll leave it to you to decide if and how this tape might be influencing your behavior. Mild versions of this tape are relatively normal. If you are human, you've probably got some version of this tape. A strong version of this tape can create serious problems in your life. Here it is:

"Everybody ought to love me all the time."

This is a classic example of irrational thinking. Yes, it would be nice if everyone loved us all the time. Nice, but not realistic. If this tape is constantly playing in your head, how do you think it influences your ability to:

• Be an effective leader/manager?
• Be an effective salesperson?
• Be an effective speaker or writer?
• Be an effective teacher or coach?
• Be an effective parent?
• Be an effective human being?

Do you know anyone with a strong version of this tape? How effective are they? How enjoyable is it to be around them?

How are you doing with your version of this mother-of-all-behavioral tapes?

Think about it!

Marriage Tapes

In the last two postings, I shared some general comments on behavioral tapes and specific comments on tapes related to your relationship with money. Now let's explore marriage tapes. Marriage tapes are feelings and beliefs that somehow were encoded into your psyche and are now influencing your relationship with your spouse (or significant other in the case of an unmarried couple). In order to illustrate how marriage tapes can influence your relationship with your partner, let's talk about a young married couple with a child. Here's some information on the couple:

• Mary and David are both twenty-nine years old and have been married for three years.
• Their son Steven is two years old.
• When Mary was growing up, holidays and birthdays were festive events.
• When David was growing up holidays and birthdays were non-events.
• Mary's extended family...aunts, uncles, cousins and others frequently gathered together for family events. If something happened to one of them, it was as if it happened to all of them.
• David did not get along with most of the members of his family. He didn't particularly care to spend time with them.
• Members of Mary's family openly discussed their problems and asked each other for help with them.
• In David's family it was best to keep problems to yourself and work them out on your own. 
• Mary grew up in a comfortable home. Her parents were not overly concerned with neatness.
• David grew up in a formal home. Clutter of any kind was not tolerated.
• Mary's parents loved to go on family vacations.
• David's father did not take vacations.   
• When Mary was young, her dad came home every day around 5:30 pm and spent the next hour playing and talking with her. She has fond memories of childhood experiences related to her dad coming home from work.
• When David was young, his father almost never came home until after 8:00 pm. Upon arriving, David's father usually fixed himself a drink, went into his home office and worked, read the newspaper or watched TV. David learned from experience that it was not a good idea to bother his father when he was in his office.

Okay...that's enough. I think you get the picture. Do you think there is any potential for conflict and stress in this marriage? And I didn't even discuss religion, politics, money or sex. What do you think Mary's tapes tell her about how a marriage works? What do David's tapes tell him about how a marriage works? Can you predict some of the likely fights between Mary and David? For example, what happens on holidays and birthdays? And what is a father supposed to do when he gets home from work?

These are just some examples of how tapes can create chaos between two people in a relationship. Mary and David may be great people, they just don't see eye-to-eye on many issues that can make or break a marriage. Unfortunately these differences in tapes often get personalized and destroy marriages. If you plan to develop and maintain a healthy and enjoyable relationship with any other person (friend, co-worker, boss, subordinate, etc.), it is a good idea to spend some time learning about their tapes. If you plan to enjoy a fulfilling and lasting marriage...it's a great idea to learn as much as possible about your spouse's tapes.       

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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.

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.

Something to Do at Family Gatherings

I'll bet many of you have heard the story about the holiday gathering and the woman who cut off both ends of the ham before cooking it. When her daughter asked her why she cut off the ends of the ham, she replied, "I don't know. Your grandmother taught me to do that. She's in the living room. Go ask her." When asked the same question, the grandmother said, "I don't know. Your great-grandmother taught me to do that. She's in the den. Go ask her." When asked the same question, the great-grandmother said, "Because I had a small cooking pan...the whole ham wouldn't fit in the pan!"

Cutting off the ends of a ham without really thinking about why you are doing it is an example of a behavioral tape. When we perform certain functions, encounter certain situations or recognize certain patterns, we sometimes respond with automatic or pre-programmed behavior that is driven by a behavioral tape. Sometimes these tapes serve us well...and sometimes they do not. For example, most of us have a tape that makes us automatically "look both ways before we cross the street." This tape served us well as a child and continues to serve us well as adults. The "cut off the ends of the ham" tape illustrates how things we learned from our family members can strongly infuence our behavior and easily be passed from generation to generation...even when the tape no longer makes sense! 

Being mysteriously influenced to cut off the ends of a ham is a relatively harmless tape. Such tapes probably won't cause many serious problems in your life. However, some tapes related to how marriages work, how to raise children, how to handle money, how to interact with people and how to respond to the inevitable ups and downs of a normal life probably shouldn't be passed on to the next generation. It might be time to consider re-writing some of the behavioral tapes that are not serving you well and stop them during your lifetime. One way to start this process is by conducting a little informal research on your personal inventory of behavioral tapes. What better time and place to do that than at holiday gatherings?

Don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting that you approach this task by grilling your relatives and trying to probe deep into their inner psyches in an all-out effort to release your inner demons. Lighten up and just engage them in some interesting conversations about "how things were" when you were growing up. Since it is likely that your parents simply passed on many of the tapes they learned from their parents, you will probably get better results by asking indirect questions. For example, rather than asking your parents about their attitude toward money when you were young (which is the point in time that you probably formed many of your attitudes about money)...ask them about their parent's attitude toward money...or ask them what their parents taught them about politics, religion, dealing with authority figures, scarcity, abundance, trusting others, assertiveness, sympathy, compassion, risk-taking, etc. If your parents are no longer living...ask relatives to tell you about your parents. And remember, you may have duplicated your parents tapes...or you may have reversed their tapes and decided, "When I grow up I will never be like them!" For example, if you saw people take advantage of your mom or dad because they were kind and gentle, you may have decided to be more assertive and forceful as an adult. Again, keep it light. You don't want anyone feeling as if they are being psychoanalyzed during holiday gatherings. If you uncover something heavy...go slam down a cup of egg nog and make a mental note to follow up on the issue later.

Here's an example of a behavior tape that I had to re-write to improve my marriage. As a child, I was taught (primarily through actions and not words) that women always cooked the ham, turkey or anything else during the holiday season. My new "holiday cooking tape" (and "everyday cooking tape" for that matter) calls for men to also participate in the preparation of meals. Therefore, if my future great-grandson tells the "cut off the ends of the ham" story...he might have to finish the story by saying, "Your great-grandfather is in the kitchen...go ask him."   

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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.