Cause and Effect

By analyzing the effects of your behaviors you can extract valuable information that will lead you to the causes of your behaviors. Cause and effect relationships are based on a characteristic or event being the result of a previous situation or occurrence. Filling a need to move forward requires a preceding and following event or occurrence. For example, when you walk into a dark room, you flick the switch and turn on the light. Why? Because you need to be able to see where you are going. Normally, you don’t walk into a lit room and flick the switch to turn off the light. That behavior is not moving forward. It is contradictory to moving forward under normal circumstances. Inferring a cause and effect relationship can be tricky. Just because an event or occurrence happens after a preceding one, does not necessarily mean that the two events or occurrences are connected. If there are alternative explanations for the subsequent events utilize the Law of Parsimony to reduce the explanations to their simplest form. If the simplest explanation has nothing to do with the preceding event, then the connection to the subsequent event is weak at best. Only through conducting ongoing experiments with your demonstrated behaviors can you see correlations between the causes and effects of your behaviors.

You enter a room full of people and over in the corner you hear an individual chatting away. You strike up a conversation with some people and no matter how much you try to concentrate on what they are saying, the sound of the chattering individual keeps grabbing your attention. You start feeling uncomfortable and you try harder to concentrate on your conversation. You begin to sweat a little and you feel a tingling in your body. The chatterer and his listeners begin to laugh and you feel disturbed. You begin to wonder, “Why are these people listening to this useless drivel?” You choose to ignore it and not react but no matter how much you try the chatterer’s voice stands out in the crowd. There is something unresolved within you about chatterers that constantly resurfaces every time you hear the voice of the chatterer. You begin to wonder what it is that irritates you so much. Is it the sound of the voice? Is it what they are saying? Is it the humorous reactions? Is it the fact that the chatterers conversation is more interesting than yours? Or is it that you are succumbing to previous programming concerning those who chatter? You leave the room and no longer hear the chatter and you begin to relax. You have removed yourself from the environment and apparently, things seem better. Was it because you left the room and were no longer exposed to the chatterer? Or was it because you feel more comfortable when you seem to be in control of your environment?