Learnt Behaviour
by Di Browne
When I first heard of learnt behaviour during my coaching studies, I immediately thought of it as behaviours we adapt to comply with society’s rules. Things like sleeping during the night, obeying the law and fidelity. Well it is about that and so much more!
Put simply behaviours are strategies and everything we do is a strategy. A very basic example of a strategy is how we dry ourselves after a shower. You do it in a particular way! First you might dry your face, then your hair, then your back or chest. It doesn’t matter how you do it, what matters is the end result. The important question in relation to strategies is ‘do the infinite amount of strategies we run in our lives give us the results we want?’ In other words ‘are your strategies getting you the outcomes you want?’
Every single behaviour we have has been learnt because we either saw someone else do it, as a survival mechanism or if we consciously chose it. Considering there are infinite learnings, besides the behaviours we chose, how many have we learnt that we unconsciously act out in our everyday lives?
Let’s have a look at a strategy/learnt behaviour that has greater consequence than not being dry. Imagine you grew up in a household where you gained respect from voicing your opinion no matter how much you had to raise your voice to get your point of view across! So your belief in this example would be, to get respect you need to make sure you get your opinion across no matter what. You would think this is how to gain respect. After all this is how it was in your family and it worked then.
The thing is we adapted and learnt behaviours in the past that no longer work for us now.
Some of our strategies are no longer serving us, there are actually working against us. Using the example above, some people do not react very well to people raising their voices. If they grew up in a household where it was disrespectful to raise their voice at someone, their belief may be that it is a bad thing to raise your voice. They would not respect anyone who uses this strategy/learnt behaviour! So in trying to gain respect, the person trying to get their point across only managed to be disrespected. This strategy worked against him in this example and more than likely he wouldn’t know why!
So how do you know what strategies you are unconsciously running that are not serving you now? In other words, how do you know what you don’t know?
Start by looking at anything in your life where you are not getting the results or outcomes you want. Maybe you have the same or similar results in your finances, health, career and relationships as those people you originally learnt the behaviours from. If you want different results, start modelling people who have what you want in that area. Do what they do, think what they think and be who they are in the area where you want the same outcome.
By changing your strategy you will get a different outcome. Einstein said ‘the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.’ To get a different result all you need to do is to change something in your strategy! To get an even better result, model excellence!
Di Browne
Coach to Empower
September 12, 2012 2:25 pm 
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