Creating Positive Associations to a Toilet Paper Roll?

Change is often difficult because as we’re trying to push through the change we are forced to face negative associations that may have been created.

In other words, it’s the pain pleasure processing. If we associate more pain then pleasure we won’t make the change. You’ll be doing yourself a huge favor if you inventory the things you know you should be doing but don’t seem to be consistent at doing it. It could be losing weight, exercise more, eating the right foods, quit smoking or increasing your income.

I can assure you that the reason you are not doing some of what you should be is because you unconsciously have a negative association to it. You associate more pain to the action than the pleasure from the result.

I was recently playing with my new bird Winnie. I’m always looking for things around the house that he might like to play with. He’s living garbage disposal and loves to chew and destroy anything in his way.

I noticed it liked playing with paper towel and toilet paper rolls. Then one day it dropped the toilet paper roll. I picked it up for him and tossed it to see if he’d catch it. Well that back fired on me. He totally freaked out. So from that day on if you bring a brown paper towel or toilet paper roll near him he goes on his defense immediately. Why?

He changed what used to be a positive association, playing with it, to a negative one. It’s going to attack me. Though this is a simple example, we humans work the same way. My goal now was to figure out how to get Winnie to get back to the point of not being afraid of the brown toilet paper roll and actually loving it more than before.

From a behavioral stand point, I needed to change his association back to positive. How did I do that? It was quick simple. Winnie LOVES almond butter. I put a bunch of it on the roll, then placed some on my finger so he could smell and taste it.

Next, I let him see that the same almond butter was on the roll and in seconds take a guess who loves that toilet paper roll?

Believe it or not many of our behaviors can be changed that quickly. If you’ve ever experienced my live events you see it happen all day long. Granted I make it look pretty easy but I’ve been doing this for decades.

Here is what I’d like you do to now. Pick two main things in your life that you are having a challenge not following through on. Next, be super honest with yourself and decode what the negative association is that you have created that’s keeping you from following through. Usually the answer comes in the form of an excuse. Get past the excuse and figure out what the real reason is.

You have to be honest and throw away the excuses. You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.

Now that you have discovered the negative association the next thing is to figure out how creative you can be to change it from negative to positive. The moment you do that…BAM, change happens.

My ability to direct you deeper is very limited through just writing here but I at least wanted to share this basic foundation with you with hopes it gets you thinking and learning how to play games with your mind instead of your mind playing games with you.

Now go have fun with your mind games!