Stop Bad Habits with Self-Reflection

Often how we know whether things are unconscious or conscious is that simple word of progress. If progress, momentum, advancement, success is happening, people tend to be a little bit more conscious of their behavior. If those things aren't and they feel stuck, then sometimes some unconscious patterns are dominating their life. Today's topic I'd love to take on is insight. Developing purposeful insight about your life and others lives. This is awesome this time of year. And so what I like to think about is a simple question I'm going to ask you to be aware of and mindful of all week long. Just a little challenge for you. Think about this simple question. What's driving this behavior? I think that's one of the most important insights we can get about our lives and other people's lives. Insight about what is driving this behavior. You feel yourself getting distracted all the time. Well, distraction is a behavior. What's causing that? What's driving that behavior? You feel yourself overeating. What's driving that behavior? You got too angry with your spouse. What's driving that behavior? The kids flipped out at you this morning when you're making their lunch. What is driving their behavior? I've asked this question, boy, more times than I can count for the majority of my career. Implicitly or explicitly in some way or another. I'm always wondering what's driving this behavior. Always have a curious outlook to it. I never think I know the answer fully, but I have some theses, I've got a hypothesis, a guess. And so I'm always asking that, gosh, you know what, my spouse is down. What's driving that behavior? Oh, you know what, I missed another meeting. What's driving that behavior? Because if we don't look to why we do what we do, why we feel what we feel, why we are on the track we are on or not, then how are we ever going to get an insight into what's right for us? I know incredibly successful people who aren't happy and a lot of it is they don't understand their own behavior or what they want. They're always at the whim of that chaotic amygdala that is in fight, flight, freeze or flow and they can't quite determine why they do what they do. So even though they have a big ambition, maybe sometimes they sabotage it, maybe sometimes they got the big idea, but they won't take the step towards it because of fear or they talk themselves out of it, but they don't know why. Or they're always on this, you know, upward spiral and then downward spiral and they're all in constant yo yo and they're wondering why. And if you never get insight into your behavior and the behaviors of others, you never have real influence with yourself or with others. So all week long I'd just love you to say what's driving this behavior? And don't feel like you need to know the definitive answer. I actually think that that can be problematic, especially when we talk about other people's behaviors. Right? If you are observing your partner or your spouse and you're trying to figure out their behavior and you decide why or what is driving their behavior without a conversation, then you're just a judgmental assumptionist. You know, you're just making assumptions with other people. I love to have the conversations about, hey, I see you doing this, what are you thinking? What are you trying to do there? What's the goal? What's the outcome? See, you're doing that all the time for yourself. You're doing behaviors, but sometimes you may or may not be conscious of what you're actually after, what you really are thinking, what's driving that behavior? And so we get into practice of asking the question, what's driving this behavior? Now the good news is it's just a two sided coin of what's driving that behavior. It's either conscious or unconscious. That's it. What's driving us? At any given time, we're either conscious of what's driving us or we're not. And of course there's all, it's a two sided coin. So they do intermix in material, right? You can think, you know, and have total clarity of why you're doing something, but unconsciously you might be driven by something else or you might do something just automatically and it seems so easy and it seems unconscious. But no, just mere seconds ago you set the intention to do it. And so of course these things overlap. But it's a useful framework to think of is like, well, I'm either conscious of why I'm behaving this way or I'm not. And then we dig down deeper. What we come to find is that there's really only what, I don't know, three or five reasons people are doing what they're doing. What's driving people's behavior tends to come down to these few items. One is just conditioning. They've been told to do it, they've been rewarded to do it, and they've been doing it so long, it's just what they do. There's not a lot of conscious thought about it. It's Just conditioning their mom or dad told them to think like that. They think like that. They had a parent or a caregiver or a teacher teach them to behave like that or reward them for behaving like that. They still do. Or same thing. Maybe they had a parent, caregiver, teacher, influential person in their life who neglected them, who mistreated them. And they learn an adaptive behavior set to protect themselves. So they were conditioned to protect themselves or to fight for themselves, or to strive hard to belong and be rewarded. And they're just still running that old conditioning pattern that they haven't revisited as a conscious adult. This happens all the time. When people come to my personal development seminars, they tend to find themselves in this place where a lot of people come in thinking they know everything about their lives. And then they realize, oh wait, there's so much more to uncover. I didn't realize I was like this, or I didn't feel loved because of this, or I've been striving for love or attention because of these reasons. And it's just another level of insight. Doesn't make anyone right or wrong, bigger, better or better than anyone else. It just means some people are way more conscious about the things that are driving them. But conditioning, some things may have happened to you in the past that just made that become your love language or this become your preferred response in that conflict situation. Right? We always. Personal development is a self awareness game. And we always have to dig deep into what has happened to us in our lives and the choices and reactions we had throughout our lives that became a behavioral pattern, a set of habits in how we think and respond and plan and behave in the world. Much of it, a lot of it came from early conditioning. Another thing that answers what drives this behavior is our commitments, our commitments to other people, our commitments to our job, our commitments to our kids, our commitments to what we believe is true, our commitments to our values. Right? Some people act like the way they do because they decided this particular value and this way of being, that's just who I am, darn it. And they have committed to that identity, that personality. And often people do that in an inflexible way. And so they keep getting in major conflicts or keep, you know, finding communication patterns that self justify all the time. And they sometimes fail to learn anymore because they committed so hard to a truth or a value or point of view. They become inflexible in their thinking. And that inflexibility leads to a fixed mindset, which is not a growth mindset. And so they Seem confident and stern, and they seem very sure and certain. And yet they watch their relationships fall apart, or they stay too long in things that they've committed to, or they get hoodwinked to things they've committed to because they aren't open enough to continually be scouting and looking and scanning and learning in that growth mindset kind of way that says, oh, I follow through on my commitments, but I am also open to learning and seeing new ways of being. Another thing that drives our behavior is our care of self or others. That's a big one. What drives most people's behavior is first caring for themselves, making sure that they are safe, making sure they are secure, making sure they are fed, making sure that they belong, making sure they seem or feel respected. And that's the same true in the side of us wanting that for other people. A lot of people's behaviors are driven by, well, I want to make the kids safe and secure and fed and respected and same thing for people at work. And so how we care for others though, tends to come from a lot of the conditioning that we experienced and the ways that we've learned to do things or that we've been rewarded by. And so we have to check those. Is the way that I'm caring for myself and the way I'm caring for others a behavioral pattern that's advancing my life, Or I'm just placating and pleasing everybody else and doing everything for them, or I'm doing everything to fit in, but I'm never growing. And really, yes, I'm a caring person for myself and others, but I'm not experiencing any progress. See, often how we know whether things are unconscious or conscious is is that simple word of progress. If progress, momentum, advancement, success is happening, people tend to be a little bit more conscious of their behavior. If those things aren't and they feel stuck, then sometimes some unconscious patterns are dominating their life. This continues further into capability. What's driving this behavior? A lot of people's behavior is driven by their capabilities, what they know how to do, what we call their competencies, their knowledge, skill, capabilities, talents. And in that expertise or in that command of a certain skill set, they're able to move forward without a lot of capabilities. Though people feel insecure or inferior in certain contexts, they feel inadequate. Their self worth or self esteem can be low because they feel like, I just don't know how to do that, so I won't be successful here, or I won't fit in here with these other people who do have the capability. And so you have people who sometimes you think, why won't they just take action? Well, sometimes the answer is they don't know how. What drives this behavior? The last piece is sometimes, and this was experienced in mass in the last few years. What drives this behavior is chaos. Good old fashioned chaos. There's just so much going on that someone can become paralyzed or uncertain by all these things that are happening. They can become suddenly that they were that active, driven person. And then so much chaos hit, so much chaos hit, and then so much more chaos hit that suddenly they lost their vibrancy or their confidence or their sense of meaning and connection and fulfillment. It's like everything. They had everything going on and then it's just like so much stuff. You know, somebody left them, they got divorced, they went bankrupt, they got sick. You know, the world shifted or changed, they got locked down, they were lonely. And then suddenly they're like, I don't know why I am like this anymore. I don't know why I sit these hours and hours in front of Netflix. I don't know why I'm acting like this or why I feel so depressed. And what's happened is there's nothing wrong with them. It's just there's been so much chaos and they didn't structure enough control in their life to have some of that regularity or that rhythm or structure that they've just kind of become unmoored. And that's why their behavior seems so erratic. They might even be highly capable. They might really care for others, they might have deep commitments, they might even have good upbringing for their conditioning. But the chaos has just thrown them off. And so they must get a firm hold again of their rhythm, of setting their boundaries, of recommitting to a focus area, of taking those small steps forward each day to get a little bit of progr progress so we can feel at least a little centered or even in command in the context of chaos. These are all conversations I'm trying to open in your mind. I don't know where you're at in your life, but I'm serving as a coach. I'm trying to just prod you along, get you to think about your life in deeper and more meaningful ways. Because I might not have the answers for you. But if we can open up your mind and get you to look at different parts of your life on a consistent basis, it's in that self awareness that we find new self knowledge, we find new self confidence, we find new self mastery. But first sometimes we got to open up the brains again and ask some tough questions. So this week, I challenge you. Ask this question of yourself or those immediately around you as you observe them. What's driving this behavior? If you're having a tough day with kids? Hey, I see you really seem frustrated. What's driving this? What's going on for you? What are you feeling? What are you thinking? What are you experiencing? What do you want? What would make you happier? What do you need? Those simple questions in our relationships can open up incredible conversations that become social awareness. You learn about them, they learn about you. And now you feel a little more connected and sane together. This is the power of personal development in social context.