Reprogramming Our Robot Minds

Jenny and Erin at a tongue-in-cheek quest for understanding have started a discussion/contest on the subject of habits. More specifically:

How big of a role do habits play in your daily life? Do your habits typically form intentionally or unconsciously? What approaches have you found successful in shaping them?

Behavior modification is one of my favorite hobbies, so I can’t resist joining in. As I mentioned in A Habit Is Just a Habit, we couldn’t operate without our automatic patterns. We’d be worse than a centipede trying to walk by consciously moving each of its legs separately. Most of our habits are completely subconscious…we can perform them without bothering our already over-burdened conscious minds. (Speaking for myself, of course.)

So in answer to Jenny and Erin, habits play an enormous role in my daily life. Most of them form unconsciously and, on the whole, work just fine. But since they’re so important, it pays to evaluate them from time to time and see which ones can be improved. My background is in science and computer programming, so I like to think of my habitual patterns as my “robot mind.” It’s a complicated system and there’s no way I can completely understand it. But that doesn’t mean I can’t tinker and reprogram parts of it to get it to work better for me.

Some of the tools I use are

• affirmations,
• visualization techniques,
• self-hypnosis,
• psychosynthesis, and
• neurolinguistic programming (NLP) techniques such as anchoring, the swish pattern, reframing, parts integration and the six-step reframe.

What about you? How would you answer those questions? Please join us in the discussion…we would love to have you.

Picture by greefus groinks via Flickr. Creative Commons license.

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Notice there’s a new page, Personal Development List, listed in Blog Menu (at the top of the left sidebar). It includes a recent version of Priscilla Palmer’s compilation.  Thanks, Priscilla!