I’m a big Reality TV fan. I love watching people carry out their daily lives for all the world to see. I often think, when she sees the playback of how she acted, she’ll realize what a jerk she was. What would happen if each of us could rewind our days and watch the playback of everything we said and did? What would we learn about ourselves? I’d bet we’d learn a lot! In fact, I’d be willing to bet that many people are completely clueless about how negative they are on a daily basis, and how that negativity impacts their ability to succeed.

How many times a day do you think negative thoughts? How many times a day do you gripe or moan about how bad things are? How often do you make remarks that make people wish they were somewhere else rather than there listening to you? How many of you think you are an extremely upbeat, positive person, so those questions surely don’t apply to you?

Contestants on reality TV shows have cameras and microphones surrounding them 24 hours a day. It’s highly unlikely the rest of us would ever be in that situation, but we could choose to use a digital voice recorder to record what we say all day long. I think it would be a fascinating experiment for each of us to try.

These days, digital voice recorders have the ability to know when to record and when to stop recording, so they skip silent moments. How interesting would it be to place one on your desk at the office, or on the coffee table at home, where it could record your conversations during the day? It would be nice if technology was advanced enough to also record our thoughts, because no doubt they can be even more revealing, but obviously that’s not going to happen any time soon. Still, the words we speak aloud can be extremely revealing…if only we could hear them played back to us. Trust me, other people have already categorized you based upon the things they’ve heard you say, and it’s very likely you’d be surprised at the categories they’ve placed you into. If you were to sit back one day, and objectively play back the various bits of conversation you’ve had, you might be surprised at what you hear.

I doubt many of you will actually go through the trouble of trying this experiment, but if any of you are brave enough to do it, I’d love to hear how it turned out for you. When you played back the recording:

Did you recognize yourself?

If you didn’t know it was you speaking, how would you categorize the person, based on the words spoken during the day?

I believe many people fail because they think they will fail. I believe many people set themselves up for failure by doubting themselves, and by constantly being negative. And I believe that most of those people have no idea just how negative they really are. If they knew…really “saw” themselves…would they change? Could they? I don’t know the answer to that, but I do think that knowledge is powerful, and that with knowledge, we can at least try to change.

So how many of you would be willing to undertake this little experiment? Anyone? If you do, please share your thoughts and discoveries in the comments below.

(from Smash Mouth. "AllStar" Astro Lounge. Interscope Records, 1999.)

Posted on July 28th, 2008 by DazzlinDonna
Filed under: Creativity Exercises