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Creating New Behaviors

Understanding Behavior

Behavior is a strategy designed to achieve something. Throwing a temper tantrum is usually a strategy to get your way. Crying your eyes out may be a strategy perhaps to stop someone from abusing you by becoming the victim or perhaps to instill guilt in someone so he or she does your bidding. Each and every one of our behavior is designed to attain a particular goal.

There are a lot of judgments elicited by certain behaviors, judgments such as "You're ignorant if you smoke cigarettes, knowing they're bad for your health," or "you must be a rotten person to abandon a relationship just when your were getting emotionally close, because you clearly must have known how mush the other person had grown attached to you." From the outside your appear to be unconscious, selfish or heartless. Deep within is another truth: the relevance of the strategy based on the original incident that defined it. In other words, there is always a logical reason a specific behavior was launched. It was a response to a particular event. Behaviors are strategies! We log these strategies into our internal computer system, giving the instructions to launch the behavior each time we recognize a similar circumstance or event.