Do you know your own behaviours?
“We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviours.” – Stephen M.R. Covey “The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything”
Behavioural science is defined as, “any of various disciplines dealing with the subject of human actions.” Our behaviours are based on our; experiences, conditioning, core wounding, programming, karmic energy, perceptions, etc. Most of us go through life asleep at the wheel justifying the behaviour based on our past. We allow our past to dictate our behaviour and we victimise ourselves by blaming it for our behaviour. Common excuses are; “it’s how I was raised”, “I’ve always done it this way”, “my religion commands this of me”, “it is my duty to protect…”, etc. Our perception that results in our behaviour is the platform for building patterns and habits that then become part of our personality.
Identifying and mapping our behaviours is challenging since we first have to break through all that wounding and conditioning. We can observe the feedback we get from interactions with others, in terms of both how they respond to us, but also how we respond to them. Judgement is always a good indicator of a behaviour that comes from core wounding and conditioning. Often times, this process can be very challenging because it can be ugly to uncover these behaviours that we have engaged with. Our behaviour is what we can control, the combination of our thoughts, words and actions. Observing our triggers and in turn, what we think, say and do, are excellent tools to understand our behaviours and starting points to find the cause of our behaviours.
Shifting behaviour requires awareness, desire, patience and dedication. We have to first be aware of a behaviour and have a desire to change it. Beyond that, we need to put in the work, creating a practice that we dedicate ourselves to do on a daily basis to over time break the patterns and habit and replace them with healthy behaviours.