Analyzing Your Behaviors

The first step in seeking out the facts surrounding your life is to analyze your behaviors. Observation is the act of experiencing an event, situation or occurrence and recording what you have experienced. What and how do your record the event? You simply write it down or make an audio or video recording of what you observed. First, record the physical characteristics such as date, time and location. Also, take note to the characteristics of any objects that trigger your behaviors such size, color and orientation. Second, record your feelings about your behaviors. Are you interested, ambivalent or disinterested? Third, record the thoughts you have about your behaviors. Are they appropriate, selfish or inappropriate? Fourth, measure these behaviors against your values and determine if they align with those values. And finally, collate all of this information into an understandable format for YOU that will reveal why you display these behaviors. Design a plan to implement and support the positive behaviors while simultaneously converting negative behaviors into positive ones.

Observation involves the recording of information available to the senses from either direct input or enhanced input from sensitive recording instruments to the senses. Our senses are the filters through which information flows to our brains. Our senses and instruments are limited. They do not reveal all of the information present, just ranges of information. It is integral that your record accurate physical characteristics of your behaviors. These include the time, environmental conditions (temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, inclement weather or fair weather, inside or outside), distance to the objects that trigger behaviors, size (mass) of the objects or the volume of the objects. Since these measurements are represented by numbers they are referred to as quantitative observations. Also record the qualitative observations which include descriptions of the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures of the objects that trigger your behaviors. Objects can be anything existing in nature.

Recording your feelings about your behaviors can be a tricky thing because emotions are layered. A person might feel that they don’t like the way that they respond to people that chatter too much. Until they peel off the layers of emotions to reveal the underlying emotion, they won’t truly know why they respond by moving away from this type of person. The root emotion could be that when they were a child a person that talked too much hurt someone they cared about. They became angry as a result because they were a child and hadn’t yet developed their brain to the point that reasoning became a part of their behavioral formula of interpreting reality. Anger is the feeling we experience when we feel we are not being treated fairly. Examine your emotions by logging all of the feelings that you experience, no matter how trivial they feel. Emotional intensity does not reveal the significance of the emotion, but it does reveal the relevant layers that sit upon the root emotion. You will move toward feelings that you like and you will move away from feelings that you don’t like. If you are interested in something you will seek it out. If you are ambivalent, you have yet to decide what to do. If you are disinterested, you will move on to other things that interest you. Observe and record the intensities of your interest levels in regard to your emotional responses to your behaviors.