Understanding Human BehaviourHuman behaviour, this is a fascinating subject once you realise the impact that understanding it has on your life. I mean think about it, this is something that should be understood by us all. Without understanding this we might as well be as primitive as wild animals. We as humans have been created/evolved (whatever your belief) to be intelligent creatures who are in control of our own lives and our environment. One problem is that we don’t all seem to grasp human behaviour and what really drives us to do what we do. Do you know why you do the things you do? Do you question certain things in your life? What if there was a different option you could take in a given circumstance that would drive you in a radically more empowering direction? What if there was one thing that you do on a regular basis that you changed? This change in human behaviour might be the difference between success and failure. There are literally infinite choices we could make in any given situation. The problem is that we have been conditioned to only see a few of these and the opportunities we see are a result of the experiences we have been exposed to in our lives. Human behaviour is determined by what we have learned throughout time to associate to each unique moment and derive a meaning from it.
Do you agree that in certain situations, different people react differently even if the circumstance is identical to the one you have experienced? Of course this is true but most people don’t even question why. So many people go through life with extreme intelligence to understand the inner workings of computers, cars, space shuttles and even human physiology but often they don’t understand human behaviour and what drives us to our own unique lives. We are all different no matter how close our circumstances may be because we have all had a different experience of the world that sets up a pattern in our brain. Human behaviour is often determined by things like generalisations, beliefs and rules. Let me explain deeper. When we learn something, we subconsciously set up generalisations to tell us how to interpret similar situations in the future. An example is turning on a light, you know that if you flick the switch either up or down then you can turn on the light. This is not rocket science but it sets up an understanding of human behaviour. Just as in the light switch example you make generalisations about everything you do so that the next time you are confronted with a similar situation you know what to do. Imagine if you didn’t, each time you tried to open a door or turn on the lights, you would struggle because you wouldn’t have learned from that past experience. One glitch in this trait of human behaviour is that we tend to make generalisations about everything, which sometimes sets up a false or limiting belief/rule. Lets say you have an experience of doing something like starting a business, then you fail. You try it several more times and fail. This has a terrible impact on human behaviour and how you use generalisations if you don’t understand how to recognise and control it.
What can often happen is that you believe that most businesses just fail and there is a slim chance of ever succeeding in the future. I’m sure you can understand, without me explaining, why this will limit you in the future. But even this experience happening to different people can have a different impact based on their past conditioning. If you have been raised to never give up on something, to learn from failures and devise new strategies when one doesn’t work, then your response and the generalisations and beliefs you form about the situation will be enormously different from someone who was beaten and yelled at every time they got something wrong. In understanding and controlling our own human behaviour we need to first understand what drives and motivates us, our values, what we associate to certain situations, what our past experience has taught us on a subconscious level, what we fear (again on a subconscious level), how we interpret reality and several other things. This may all sound complicated but it’s all quite simple when you can learn certain fundamentals of simplicity and learning how YOU actually learn as an individual. The Two Universal Human Motivators In understanding human behaviour, there are two motivators that are universal to everyone, without exception. All of our actions, decisions, beliefs, values etc, are all motivated and determined by these two forces. You may already know what I am going to say, or maybe not. The two forces are pain and pleasure. This may sound unbelievably simple and it is. The problem is that most people don’t understand the full extent of what pain and pleasure means, let alone understanding how it motivates all human behaviour. Have you ever wondered why it is often very hard to break addiction? Or why it’s so hard to make important changes in your life? It’s because you associate more pain to stopping the behaviour or breaking the addiction than to continuing to do it. This may sound insane, because there is often incredible pain associated to this addiction or behaviour. Here’s the kicker, most of us don’t realise what the full scope of pain actually means in regards to human behaviour. Pain can be physical, it can be emotional hurt, it may be just the pain of inconvenience or discomfort, basically it’s any feeling that you want to avoid.
This may give you a clearer understanding of how pain affects human behaviour. Let’s say you want to break the habit of overeating, start exercising and lose weight. Here’s how pain and pleasure will determine your success or failure with this outcome; you decide to go on a diet, join a gym and go walking every day. So what’s the problem? You have the willpower and desire to change but then you slip back and gain more weight back the second time around. How did this happen? For some it’s happened several times. You may really want to lose the weight but you didn’t have enough leverage. You associated (note the word associated, it doesn’t mean to think about, it means that you emotionally have a feeling attached to it) more pain to the inconvenience of feeling hungry or the pain of having to put in hard physical work each day to exercise than you do to having the extra weight. The pain was outweighed in favour of staying fat. So you need to create enough leverage to make the shift. There is more detail on this on the page about pain and pleasure/leverage, just follow the link. One of the main things to understand about this aspect of human behaviour is that often the pain or pleasure we may associate to a behaviour is imagined. What I mean is that you may believe that something will lead to pain or pleasure based on your generalisations and perceptions that you have been conditioned with, even if it’s not true. On the page on pain and pleasure/leverage, I will give a more detailed description about this and provide you with tools to control your human behaviour utilising pain and pleasure, not having pain and pleasure use you. For a deeper understanding of the two human motivators...
What do we really want In our lives we might want various things. You may want a big home, expensive cars, lots of money etc, you might be a humanitarian and see success as helping others and contributing, it may be fame and fortune that you desire. But why do you want these things? What will happen when you have all this money? What will be different with all the fame, fortune and respect? The answer is that it will make you feel good. These things will give you a feeling that you want. It’s never the actual things that you really want at the deepest level. Let me tell you a secret, it’s something most people don’t understand about human behaviour. Are you ready? It’s so easy to feel good. Wow, I’m glad that cat is out of the bag. What do I mean? I mean that you can feel good in any moment no matter what your outside circumstances are. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t set goals for these other things, I just mean that they shouldn’t be your criteria for obtaining the feelings and experiences that you value in your life. So how do we feel good in any given moment? Well one of the biggest flaws in human behaviour is that we don’t seem to have any control over our state. But what determines our states? How are emotions caused? Scientifically they are a bunch of neurological reactions occurring in your brain all the time. The problem is that most of the time our brain just reacts to an outside circumstance and puts you in that emotional state.Put it this way, you need to be feeling some emotion, a state, at every moment, if you’re not then you’re dead. Simple as that. So if you don’t have control over it then your brain will create or access a state based on past experience, memory or conditioning. This can be very dangerous because your emotions in a given moment are controlled by things that you can’t control. If you and I are to be effective in life we need to learn to control our state. The first step is to control the way we use our own body. Have you ever noticed that if you don’t move around a lot you become even more tired and depressed and how exercise can cause amazing positive emotions? It’s because your brain reacts to this movement and causes reactions that tell you to feel differently. If we can understand this facet of human behaviour, this alone will have an enormous impact on the way we live our lives and the decisions we make. The bottom line is that if we learn to use our body the right way, we will have a powerful resource available at anytime to control how we feel. Of course there is more about this on the page on emotional states including how to anchor those states into your nervous system so you re-create any emotion at anytime.
The second thing to controlling how you feel is changing what you are focussing on consistently. If you focus on all the things that could go wrong with a situation then you’re likely going to feel terrible and interpret it poorly. This will affect how you deal with it. Do you agree with me that it makes a lot of difference to the way you feel in a given moment depending on what you decide to focus on? Here’s an example; lets say that you take 100 photographs of a person. In one photo album you only include the 50 photos of that person smiling, laughing and having a great time. In the second photo album you only include the 50 photos of that same person, except this time every picture is of them crying, angry, miserable and tired. So now you have the 2 albums. If you show the first happy photo album to someone, what kind of person do you think most people will say about the one in the pictures? Of course they will see that person as incredibly happy, motivated, warm and vibrant. On the other hand if you show someone else the other album with the sad and miserable shots, what conclusion do you think they will draw? They will likely think that the person in the photos is a miserable, troubled and unhappy individual. Do you see how what you focus on can change your emotion and perception of something? The interesting thing about human behaviour is that we all do this in life all the time. If we find ourselves in a certain situation we can choose what to focus on. If we focus on all of the bad in a situation we will begin to feel that there is no good to come of it and that it the whole circumstance is terrible. How empowering do you think that would be? Does that drive you to action and make you more resourceful? Of course it doesn’t. But remember, we can choose what we focus on, we can even literally create our own little fantasy of the whole thing. So instead of directing your focus to the bad in a situation, how about focussing on what you can do better next time, what you have learned, how it may have saved you future trouble had that not happened, how you can use it to your advantage etc.
The circumstances are the same however just by changing what you’re focussing on, you literally change the way you feel about it. You will access far more resourceful states and thus be able to overcome it more easily and have more control over the way you feel. Imagine if you always focussed on something empowering, even in a bad situation. It may be hard at first but after you do it consistently for a while, it will become habit and your life will be massively more rewarding. Direct you focus and you change your emotional states, simple as that. Combining the two principles of changing your physiology and consciously directing your focus, you have a powerful resource to access those states that make you feel good and allow you to be more effective. There is only one thing that we need to overcome when we change what we focus on. We interpret our own meanings from the things we focus. Again these meanings are based on our previous conditioning and beliefs so we make individual judgements and generalisations. The key is to make up your own meanings about the things that you focus on. Only accept meanings that move you forward, drop those meanings that cause you to dwell on the negative. All this may seem very Pollyanna and simplistic but it works if you’re consistent about it. The reason most people don’t already do something so simple is a conditioned belief that feeling good and accessing resourceful states is far more complicated than that. So many people let their outside circumstances control how they feel and hence how effective they are as people instead of gaining control over the way they feel and having the enormous power of designing their own human behaviour and their own reality. So let me say this. The one enormous power we have that we can use in an instant to change the entire course of our lives is the ability to consistently control our emotional states which in turn change the decisions we make and this will change every outcome and the way we use each and every opportunity presented to us. It will even determine whether or not you even notice opportunities. What we’ve covered on this page is basically an introduction to human behaviour. Follow some of the links on this page to gain a deeper understanding of it and the tools you need to apply these philosophies of human behaviour to your life in the simplest and most effective ways.
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